From the moment we meet luxury nursing-home patient Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), we feel something is up. The knowing sparkle in his baby-blue eyes; his slender gold chain and tufts of chest hair poking out of his medical jammies; his low, measured drawl — is it the voice of a former player who knows his mind is fading, and is playing sly to save face? Or is he perfectly in control of his faculties? In Georgia Bernstein‘s gratifyingly perverse debut “Night Nurse,” this ambiguity upends the usual patient-caretaker dynamic, especially since Douglas’ new doe-eyed nurse Elemi (Cemre Paksoy) seems especially vulnerable to being controlled.
An erotic thriller with the glassy-eyed eeriness of a Peter Strickland joint, and with the kind of slippery sexual sensibility you might find in a Catherine Breillat provocation, “Night Nurse” premiered in Sundance’s experimental NEXT section this past January, and now opening in limited theaters across the U.S. It’s a gloriously deviant oddity, best suited to niche audiences drawn to atmosphere over plot, as Bernstein’s script achieves more as a woozy dreamspace than a neat crime story.
In any case, the scheme shaping the film’s stakes is introduced from the get-go, in a sultry opening credits scene where the camera glides over curly telephone cords and grasping hands in close-up. Over these images, two voices languidly recite what sounds like a roleplaying script, in which a desperate girl appeals to her grandpa for money. Later, we find out that this dialogue is a version of a game (albeit with real consequences) that Douglas plays with his nurses.
The first night of Elemi’s shift, her patient corners her and pushes a phone into her face, demanding she play a hapless granddaughter begging her pops for settlement money; at the end of the call, Douglas takes over as her supposed attorney. It’s not immediately clear whether this scam has teeth or is merely a performance, but soon the full scope of Douglas’s grift (which also involves his day-nurse Mona, played coyly by Eléonore Hendricks) comes to the knowledge of the care facility’s leadership. This includes the steely Doctor Mann (Mimi Rogers), who may or may not have secrets of her own. There’s no (let’s say, conventional) sex here, but the nasty mind games and rough, breathless encounters pull in a satisfying amount of heat.
Played gamely by newcomer Paksoy, fidgety Elemi plunges a bit too willingly into her part, fueling the film’s spicy propositions about the dark side of devotion and the potentially weird desires running, unsuspected, through dynamics of care and dependence. Bernstein was partly inspired by a true story involving her grandmother, who almost fell victim to a money-wiring scam by someone impersonating Bernstein’s brother, but the script only gestures at this real-world exploitation, ultimately using it as a jumping-off point for an erotic fantasy rife with taboos.
Bernstein unfolds her naughty intrigue in the Chicago suburbs, where her grandmother lived, but the softly-lit, sterile locations — swimming pools, carpeted living rooms, motel rooms — evoke a state of limbo more than any real place. Cinematographer Lidia Nikonova’s waxy visuals work together with the cast’s lightly vacant performance styles to bolster this trance, creating a hazy mood that echoes Elemi’s loss of control; her gradual surrender to urges newly unleashed by Douglas.
This brings us to the film’s greatest (and perhaps most frustrating) mystery: who is Elemi that she falls so deeply under her patient’s spell? This ambiguity doesn’t feel entirely intentional, but at least Paksoy’s performance makes her character’s unraveling feel nervy and thrillingly palpable. And as the film veers towards its unsettling finale, Bernstein turns a final trick that reveals her triumphantly sick sense of humor: “Night Nurse” is also a romance with a bleeding, black heart.
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