Film review: Chastain is good as ‘The Good Nurse,’ but Redmayne is bad as the bad nurse

In the opening shot of “The Good Nurse,” a slow, steady, unilluminating drip of a medical mystery, a serial killer in scrubs named Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) watches his victim die. The patient has gone into convulsions, and Charles, the nurse who sounded the alarm, stands back as the doctors swoop in and try in vain to save the day. In a perhaps inadvertently telling gesture, the camera eases the suffering, flatlining patient out of the frame and creeps slowly toward Charles, whose inscrutable expression is meant to chill you to the bone. It’s as if the murderous satisfaction he feels – and the anxious concern he’s trying to project – have somehow canceled each other out, leaving only a curious, malevolent blankness.

Redmayne, an actor who tends to call attention to his own subtlety, works hard to make that blankness sinister. (The ominously pulsing score composed by Biosphere tries even harder.) It isn’t sinister, though; it’s tiresomely obvious. Even as the doctors respond to a code blue, the movie throws up its own “Uh-oh, maniac alert!” signal to the audience, establishing Charles as a teasing enigma that will presumably be unraveled by story’s end. Why did the real-life Cullen spend his 16-year nursing career murdering patient after patient, injecting their IV bags with lethal doses of insulin, digoxin and other medications? (He confessed to killing 40 people between 1988 and 2003; it’s estimated that the real number may have been as high as 400.)

A quick scroll through Cullen’s Wikipedia page turns up some potential clues: childhood bullying, multiple suicide attempts, his parents’ untimely deaths. None of these details – or an early stint in the U.S. Navy, where he was further harassed and bullied – appear in Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ screenplay, which she adapted from Charles Graeber’s 2013 book, “The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder.” For a while, that omission feels like the right decision, born of a principled refusal to sentimentalize a killer or ascribe his actions to a tidy, convenient set of motives. Instead, the director, Tobias Lindholm, keeps Charles at a distance, easing him in and out of the story at key moments and drawing continual attention to his practiced bedside manner and warm, solicitous smile.

It helps that when we first see Charles again, after that clunker of a prologue, it’s through the welcoming eyes of a colleague, Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), who’s also based on a real-life individual. Chastain’s strong, unfussy performance conveys Amy’s professional expertise, tireless work ethic and unfeigned compassion for those under her care; she’s every inch the good nurse of the title. She’s also a victim of the overwhelmed, underfunded healthcare system she works for: A single mom with a heart condition that she doesn’t dare disclose to her employers, Amy keeps working her long, stressful nights and ungodly hours, hoping she can hold out for just a few more months until her health insurance kicks in.

She’s grateful, then, when Charles joins her on her shifts, especially when he finds out about her illness and agrees to keep it a secret. He becomes, in a sense, her own personal caretaker, on hand to relieve her workload and even babysit her two young daughters (Devyn McDowell and Alix West Lefler). Even if they weren’t such immediately close friends, Charles would be the last person Amy would suspect of wrongdoing, even after some of their patients begin to die under mysterious circumstances. It will fall to two police detectives (Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich, a nicely efficient pair) to focus suspicion on Charles, who over the last few years has worked at nine different hospitals – none of which are willing to speak about his employment, or about the similarly suspicious deaths that occurred on his watch.

And so “The Good Nurse” becomes a larger indictment of the ruthlessly capitalistic medical establishment that, rather than confront its own considerable liability, shuttled Cullen from one hellish appointment to the next. You might be reminded, as I was, of the Catholic Church’s well-documented sexual abuse cover-ups, its habit of quietly relocating accused priests to new and unsuspecting parishes. You might also be reminded of movies, like “Spotlight,” that chronicled the unraveling of those conspiracies with a cool, methodical intelligence that “The Good Nurse” attempts to match here.

The Danish-born Lindholm, here making his first English-language feature, came to international attention with his tense, restrained dramas “A Hijacking” and “A War.” (More recently, he co-wrote Thomas Vinterberg’s Oscar-winning “Another Round” and directed the Danish crime series “The Investigation.”) He has a low-key visual approach – including a dim lighting scheme that suggests the hospital is behind on its utility payments – and a natural feel for procedural mechanics, like when he’s teasing out the details of how Charles manages to manipulate the hospital’s Pyxis medication-dispensing machine.

To his credit, Lindholm also acknowledges the human impact of the crimes, lingering especially on two men devastated by the loss of their loved ones and determined to help ensure it doesn’t happen again. In these moments, you get the sense, amplified by the title, that Lindholm is genuinely moved and even energized by goodness, which is why it’s easy to stay invested in Amy as she gradually realizes the extent of Charles’ crimes and becomes determined to stop them. What seems to mystify and even bore Lindholm, at least in this instance, is evil: He never gets a grip on Charles as a character, and neither does Redmayne, whose insinuatingly friendly-creepy manner gives way to ludicrous interrogation-room histrionics in the final stretch.

It’s worth noting that “The Good Nurse” is being released by Netflix, a frequent exploiter of the public’s insatiable appetite for true-crime narratives, as evidenced by countless movies and series including its controversial recent hit “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.” Partly because of the comparatively impersonal nature of Cullen’s crimes, many of which he committed without even laying a hand on his victims, “The Good Nurse” operates at a more tasteful remove. Admittedly, it’s a relief that the movie keeps the murders off-camera, that the worst offense we actually see Charles commit, really, is the crime of clinginess. What it isn’t is especially insightful or memorable.