Nurses Onscreen
The Good Nurse
A tense thriller about a real-life nurse serial killer
In this Netflix thriller, actress Jessica Chastain plays Amy Loughren, a recently-hired critical care nurse on the night shift at Parkfield Memorial Hospital in New Jersey. Amy is a single mom with two small children and some serious health issues — she suffers from cardiomyopathy, which she’s trying to keep secret from the administration until she becomes eligible for medical coverage.
When an experienced nurse named Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) joins the unit, Amy makes it her job to orient him and help him feel welcome. Soft-spoken and friendly, Charlie offers to take some of the stress off her at work. He also agrees to keep her condition a secret, and even ingratiates himself with her children. Before long, he becomes her good friend.
After one of their elderly patients dies, Amy discovers irregularities in the patient’s bloodwork, indicating that she had received insulin, although she was not diabetic. Soon, another patient dies in a similar manner.
Despite the hospital’s efforts to downplay the deaths, Amy becomes suspicious about Charlie. She launches her own investigation and learns that the unit he had worked on at a previous hospital also suffered a rash of mysterious deaths.
