By George & Josh Bate
How do you make an erotic thriller in a post-#MeToo era dominated by conversations about the ethics of cancel culture and in which sex is arguably more accessible than ever before? Filmmaker Georgia Bernstein admirably answers this question in Night Nurse, a contemporary erotic thriller that transforms the act of caregiving into something twisted, unsettling, and even uncomfortably seductive.
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.
The HoloFiles recently had the opportunity to interview writer-director Georgia Bernstein about her new movie, the inspiration behind its twisted take on caregiving, how she approached crafting an erotic thriller designed for modern audiences, and more.
The origins of Night Nurse lie in the most unexpected of places. Those who live in and around Chicago may be familiar with billboards advertising a medical school a few years ago that brandished the tagline, ‘It’s amazing to be needed.’ “I was obsessed with these billboards, and I thought they were so strange,” Bernstein recalled. “This idea, using this phrase, ‘it’s amazing to be needed,’ and I would say it to myself all the time, like, ‘It’s amazing to be needed.’… At the time, I was coming out of a long relationship and I’m definitely a caregiver type in all my relationships and I started thinking about [how] ‘it’s amazing to be needed’ is so relatable. And this idea that caregiving can become compulsive and ultimately destructive. I thought that nurses would be a perfect container for this idea. Based off this billboard, it was just a kind of perfect mixture of these ideas.”
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 becomes brainwashed by him, akin to how cult followers unflinchingly show devotion to their leader.
“It was always my intention that she just had this sort of magical, magnetic pull to him,” Bernstein described.
Bernstein explained the rationale behind centering her film around such a troubling relationship. “The movie is, in a lot of ways, about being in love with someone who’s bad for you and wrong for you,” Bernstein detailed. “So I kind of wanted it to feel like she’s going deeper and deeper into this rabbit hole. I think some audience reaction is like, ‘What is she doing? He’s treating her badly. Why would she do that?’ And I think I like that reaction. I think that’s kind of what it feels like to be in a toxic relationship. Everyone in your life is like, ‘What are you doing?’ And you’re just pulled deeper and deeper in.”
As Emeri is pulled deeper into Douglas’ world, Night Nurse demonstrates that it is a decidedly different erotic thriller than those of the past. “I’m super interested in erotic thrillers and how do you make an erotic thriller today,” Bernstein said. “I think we live in a culture where everything is permissible and so how do you make an erotic thriller when I think the important element to an erotic thriller is taboo or transgression and then also a forbidden relationship…. Forbidden love is the central element of a erotic thriller. I wanted to think about how do you make [an erotic thriller] when sex is so easily accessible online…I wanted to make an erotic thriller that had a ton of restraint and was very withholding, because, to me, I think the contemporary erotic thriller should look more like In the Mood for Love than Basic Instinct, because there’s nothing that kills eroticism like consummation. I think it’s such a contemporary approach to a genre and I found it to be such an interesting filmmaking style.”
Rather than draw on erotic thrillers like Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful, Bernstein found inspiration from more subversive sources. “I am saying maybe too many times that I love Cronenberg’s Crash and Adam Agoyin’s Exotica,” said Bernstein. “Those are two big touch points. I also love Lucretia Martel, Holy Girl. Me and my DP would often talk about the desire angle and how we would film Cemre and her perspective. The movie is very much from her perspective, so that was a big part of it. Three Women was a big inspiration. I would listen to that score a lot while I was writing. I just think that movie is so beautiful.”
Contrasting the glamorous high rises and exotic locations that erotic thrillers typically unfold in, Night Nurse takes place in a quiet, idyllic suburban neighborhood, which houses a retirement community. Bernstein explained why she chose to set her film in a setting that so starkly juxtaposes the disturbing nature of its subject matter.
“An important part of the feeling of the movie [is] feeling out of step with the contemporary world and feeling like we’re unmoored,” explained Bernstein. “I think, to me, that destabilizing feeling of the suburbs is strange and creepy. It just felt like such a natural part of the film, that it would be just beautiful and elegant. That was always our goal. We were like, ‘How can we just make this so elegant?’ It felt like the story really needed it to feel slick.”
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. Hitchcock made showers terrifying in Psycho. Children of the Corn made vast agricultural expanses terrifying. And now Bernstein reconceptualizes caregiving, one of the most endearing and necessary of acts, into something decidedly scarier than anything one could possibly predict.
Watch the full interview with Night Nurse filmmaker Georgia Feinstein below….
