By George & Josh Bate
Movies, especially those in the horror and thriller genres, do a great job of transforming the mundane and even the wholesome into the unsettling and terrifying. Psycho ruined the vulnerability of taking a relaxing shower. Children of the Corn made routine agricultural expanses into horrifying homes for murderous children. Sinister singlehandedly changed how old film reels are perceived. And now, Night Nurse reconceptualizes caregiving, one of the most endearing and necessary of acts, into something twisted, self-serving, and even destructive.
Marking the feature debut of writer-director Georgia Bernstein, Night Nurse follows Eleni (Cemre Paksoy), a quiet night nurse who starts a new job in a retirement community. Eleni’s role entails that she takes care of an elusive elderly patient named Douglas (Bruce McKenzie) as his night nurse. For reasons she can’t seem to name, Eleni is drawn to Douglas, developing an increasingly intimate relationship with him and collaborating on a series of scam calls targeting the other elderly residents of the community.
Last year, IFC Films released The Rule of Jenny Pen, a psychological thriller that took place in a nursing home and found horror through the portrayal of an elderly man who was more insidious than meets the eye. This year, IFC Films will release Night Nurse, a psychological thriller that takes place in a nursing home / retirement community that finds horror through the portrayal of an elderly man who is more insidious than meets the eye. On the surface, and based on the barebones premises alone, both films are eerily similar, and yet it quickly becomes clear that Bernstein has created something more challenging, subversive, and strangely erotic with her film.
Night Nurse is a completely unique erotic thriller. To characterize the film as an erotic thriller already elicits discomfort, given how disconcerting the film’s eroticism and intimacy is, but Bernstein undoubtedly operates within this subgenre, albeit approaching it in markedly different fashion than any previous filmmaker.
As the film begins, the audience is introduced to a solemn, reserved, and clearly troubled young woman. Cemre Paksoy’s Eleni was fired from her previous nursing gig for unknown reasons and spends much of her time in her new position blankly staring into the distance. The patient she is assigned to take care of is Douglas, an elderly man who is weirdly creepy with the way in which he speaks and seems as if he is feigning his cognitive impairment.
Eleni’s strangeness and Douglas’ off-putting demeanor bring an initial discomfort to the viewer that only amplifies when the two unexpectedly take their relationship to another level. After Douglas physically forcing Eleni to participate in a scam call to rob a fellow resident of money, Eleni perplexingly becomes transfixed by and even subservient to Douglas. She makes a sexual advance on the (disturbingly much older) man, which is rebuffed, and suddenly and mind-boggingly becomes brainwashed by him, akin to how cult followers unflinchingly show devotion to their leader.
Immediately, Eleni’s strange behavior provokes questions. Why the hell is she so transfixed by, dedicated to, and sexually interested in this decidedly unpleasant man? Why is she so willing and even addicted to helping him scam elderly people out of their money? To the film’s detriment, Bernstein opts against providing answers to these questions and, in turn, keeps her protagonist’s psyche at an arms length from the audience.
Although it is difficult to connect to a protagonist whose motivations and psychological underpinnings are so unclear, Bernstein’s bold characterization of Eleni contributes to Night Nurse’s dreamlike quality. Everyone has had a dream before in which they do things for no apparent reason or things occur with little-to-no explanation. Night Nurse is very much like that. There is a certain allure to the movie, as if it is all some kind of fever dream that is beyond rational explanation. It is not a nightmare in the sense that there are supernatural forces at play or grotesque violence, but it is rattling to see just how unfazed Eleni is by her and Douglas’ behavior.
Bernstein further approaches an erotic thriller differently from the likes of Adrian Lyne and Brian De Palma by almost entirely avoiding sexual material. Eleni throws herself onto Douglas a few times and there is seemingly some kind of twisted sexual desire on her part, but this is so secondary to the more insidious forces at play. Douglas is far from the Michael Douglas or Richard Gere characters from movies like Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful as he seems entirely uninterested, and even quite annoyed, whenever the young woman lovingly looking at him makes sexual advances. As a result, the movie is devoid of any sex scenes, and yet remarkably still feels exceedingly and uncomfortably erotic.
In part, this eroticism comes from Bernstein’s exploration of caregiving, not as an altruistic act born out of love but a pathological act that breeds self-destruction. Bernstein takes the idea that people often give themselves over to caring for another person too excessively to its wildest extreme, examining how even the most noble of initial intentions can quickly turn self-serving and self-destructive. Night Nurse’s strange and striking eroticism doesn’t come from overtly sexual material, of which there is relatively little. Rather, it finds eroticism in the subservience that comes from caring for another.
Across the board, Night Nurse features strong performances, in particular Cemre Paksoy in the lead role. Paksoy is given quite a lot to do in the film given that Bernstein’s screenplay affords her very little dialogue. But Paksoy navigates this task admirably with a performance that shows, rather than tells, how troubled this young woman is.
Bruce McKenzie, meanwhile, delivers a creepy, unnerving, and uncomfortably seductive performance as the elderly man at the center of Emeri’s fixations. McKenzie toys with the audience, much like he toys with Emeri and others, regarding the cognitive state of his character and has an interplay with Paksoy that is troubling, yet difficult to take your eyes off of.
VERDICT: 6.5/10
Night Nurse transforms the act of caregiving into something twisted, unsettling, and even uncomfortably seductive. The debut feature from filmmaker Georgia Bernstein approaches the erotic thriller decidedly different than the likes of Adrian Lyne and Brian De Palma by relegating sex to periphery in favor of the eroticism tied to subservience and caring for another person. Bernstein imbues her film with a dreamlike quality that nicely couples a lead character whose motivations and psychological underpinnings always remain under wraps. This characterization prevents one from truly connecting with the protagonist, although Cemre Paksoy excels with a largely dialogue-less performance that subtly conveys just how troubled her character is. The film frustrates with its reluctance to get inside Paksoy’s character’s head and yet it triumphs with just how disconcerting and off-putting it all is. Far from a crowd-pleaser, Night Nurse establishes Georgia Feinstein as a subversive filmmaker to keep an eye on and demonstrates cinema’s enduring ability to make the most mundane and even wholesome of phenomena terrifying.
