A SPOON FULL OF DELIRIUM // A FILM REVIEW OF “NIGHT NURSE”
BY MATEO MORENO
NIGHT NURSE, a slow-burning dive into dark eroticism premiered at this past year’s Sundance Film Festival. It’s now aiming to take over art houses across America, with a general release this week. It’s a beguiling film, with its snails pacing and dark subject matter and it does demand patience with its viewers. But if you have the patience, you’ll be rewarded with quite a fascinating film. Eleni (Cemre Paksoy) is a nurse who has just been hired at a luxury care facility called Willow Village. Her patient is Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), an elderly man who seems to be battling early-onset Alzheimer’s. She bonds quickly with a fellow nurse named Mona (Colleen Rose Trundy), who helps ease her into the new situation with Douglas and the facility in general. They also have a bit of a spark and share the same room. Douglas isn’t just any ordinary patient. He’s an ornery one, living his life in the facility as if he’s the one taking care of them. Mona suggests “going along with it” since it makes it easier. But it becomes clear early on that Douglas does have a sort of “sway” if not all-together “power” over the nurses. Douglas has set up a scheme to bribe money out of other senior citizens by way of scam phone calls where the nurses pretend to be the target’s younger relatives. Eleni is hesitant at first but quickly falls under the spell of it all, the spell of this hypnotic man and the strange aura of this place.
As time goes by, Eleni is drawn more and more into the seductive nature of Douglas and his erotic leanings. It’s as if she’s been born again and is an all-new person. The sexual thrill for Douglas is watching, touching or rubbing, as he doesn’t “function” as he used to as a younger man. And the thrill of the scam phone calls. He wraps all the nurses into it that at one point they all have a dreamy, hallucinating-esque “party” where they all crawl around the floor and share IV fluids that get them very high. Time and backstory are not important in this world, as the film seems to float from sequence to sequence, almost as if Douglas himself has trapped the viewer into his trippy world. Reality does start to fade into his world and when it does, it seemingly shatters this world of sexual thrill, breaking it apart for everyone who’s got caught in its web. Writer/Director Georgina Bernstein has crafted a wonderfully bizarre feature debut here. It’s a film that requires patience and may not be for everyone. However, its hypnotic gaze feels thrilling as you unspool its contents along with the characters. Both Cemre Paksoy and Bruce McKenzie are quite mesmerizing in their performances and their scenes together feel like a fever dream. I do think some more backstory and character development would have only added to the power of NIGHT NURSE but as it is, it’s a very interesting leap into the world of cinema for Bernstein and confidently announces her as an intriguing and original new voice.
GRADE: B+
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Georgina Bernstein STARRING Cemre Paksoy, Bruce McKenzie, Eléonore Hendricks, Colleen Rose Trundy, Mimi Rogers. OPENING IN U.S. THEATRES JULY 10TH. FOR MORE INFO:https://nightnurse.movie/