Georgia Bernstein, producer of Alex Phillips’ All Jacked Up and Full of Worms and the terrific Anything That Moves, adds feature writer and director to her resume with Night Nurse, a debut that shows polish but fails to deliver the provocation that it promises.
Starring Cemre Paksoy, Bruce McKenzie and Elonore Hendricks, the film tells the story of a young caregiver drawn into a dangerous world of deceit, manipulation and obsession. The problem with this purported erotic thriller is that it’s neither especially erotic nor much of a thriller, even if Bernstein and cinematographer Lidia Nikinova create a glossy look and palpably mysterious mood that will undoubtedly serve them better going forward, with better material to work from.
Paksoy (As the Crow Flies) plays Eleni, the new caregiver at a sleepy retirement community overseen by Doctor Mann (Mimi Rogers, Bosch). Assigned to Douglas (McKenzie), a notorious troublemaker diagnosed with cognitive decline, Eleni learns the ropes from Mona (Hendricks), whose bedside manner evidences an intimacy with him that skirts the boundaries of professionalism. Mona’s young trainee soon follows in her footsteps, and when Douglas enlists her to place a phony call to another of the community’s tenants claiming to be their granddaughter, asking for money, Eleni finds herself seduced by their patient’s charisma and the secret she shares with him.
Though Douglas seems uninterested in the more carnal pleasures of his two comely nurses, the three of them fall nonetheless into a tenuous romance, fueled both by spending all of their time together and the thrill of their crimes. After Mona leaves, Eleni expects to receive Douglas’ undivided attention, but he soon enlists several other nurses in his defrauding scheme. Yet as her fixation on Douglas intensifies, his condition appears to worsen, forcing Doctor Mann to intervene, in the process threatening to disrupt their dysfunctional routine.
Erotic thrillers arrive few and far between these days; while I won’t cast aspersions on certain generations for their predispositions to not have sex, or watch it on film, Night Nurse sadly reinforces some of those expectations anyway. The movie begins intriguingly, with a languid survey of a young woman’s body as she makes one of the blackmail phone calls that feeds Eleni like a drug. Bernstein and Nikinova treat the “landscape” almost like tilt shift photography, zeroing in on her finger as she unwinds the phone cord from around it. It’s only at the end of the title sequence that we discover a man tracing his hands over her legs as she completes the call, but for better or worse it sets an expectation for the sensuality of the mischievous game Eleni and Douglas embark upon.
Yet as we’re introduced to this insular world of seniors and the army of cute nurses who care for them, we never learn enough about it — or anyone — to really understand what’s going on, and worse, to care. Eleni arrives with a largely unspecified background as a person, much less a medical caregiver, and we don’t learn more even as a prelude for Douglas to sink his hooks into her. (It feels like it would be beneficial as both exposition and narratively in him taking her into his confidence that he, say, asks about who she is and where she’s from.) As we later learn, most of the other nurses are equally seduced by, and complicit in, Douglas’ illegal hustle; does that then make this film a deliberate indictment of senior care facilities? Or when we watch five or six young women fall asleep after taking medical-grade narcotics in his living room, is that element only incidental to its portrait of debauchery?
As a cipher for Bernstein’s ideas, Paksoy is well cast as the blank-slate Eleni, and we can believe that she gets swept along as much by Douglas’ attention as by the excitement of pulling one over on the other senior citizens he targets. For the purposes of this story, McKenzie possesses sex appeal — there’s a twinkle in his eye (as he intentionally gives the wrong answers to questions in a cognitive test) that’s easy to be drawn in by. But the movie does nothing with the pent-up energy from their largely unfulfilled attraction, and there’s not enough substance to either his manipulation or her vulnerability to carry this story to its inevitably explosive conclusion. Meanwhile, Rogers (as the film’s biggest name) seems unsure whether Doctor Mann disapproves or wishes to be a part of Douglas’ white smock-covered harem.
An erotic thriller doesn’t have to have a lot of (or one supposes, any) sex in it, but aiming for something “classy” kinda works directly against the genre’s torrid foundations, and again, it becomes unclear what Bernstein is trying to explore here. Even so, the film looks handsome, showcasing Bernstein’s precise eye for composition, while Nikinova appropriately settles on a look best defined as “the moment in the wee hours of the morning right before daylight breaks.” As functional a purpose as it serves in the moment, a shot of a car being hoisted onto a tow truck twinkles with a vibrancy I hoped the events leading up to it had matched.
There’s also something to be admired in an erotic thriller that achieves something akin to a “female gaze,” even in a story about a woman who becomes the latest entree in a man’s medical smorgasbord. But ultimately, there are too many stories to tell about elder abuse and May-December manipulation — real or imagined — for this one to arrive at a finale where your milquetoast takeaway is “this doesn’t seem like a very healthy relationship for anyone involved.” Perhaps if Bernstein had more sharply drawn an interior life for any of her characters, we’d be less worried about what they do on the outside, but rather than quickening pulses, Night Nurse should come with a surgeon general’s warning: contents may unfortunately cause boredom.
