If the American health care system doesn’t already make you nervous, watching this film will leave you hiding in a closet, whimpering like a child.
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| After Amy (Jessica Chastain) suffers a minor cardiomyopathy attack, Charlie (Eddie Redmayne) talks her down from panic. |
It can be argued — and this clearly is the point of director Tobias Lindholm’s slow-burn film — that this system is the bigger villain.
But such awareness arrives later. Our attention is drawn initially to Jessica Chastain’s richly nuanced, quietly compelling performance as Amy Loughren, a dedicated nurse in a large East Coast hospital. She’s the single mother of two young daughters — Maya (Devyn McDowell) and Alex (Alix West Lefler) — and works long hours during demanding ICU night shifts.
Amy also suffers from cardiomyopathy, a potentially fatal heart condition that manifests when her pulse rate spirals out of control. It requires surgical intervention, which she cannot yet afford; because she’s relatively new to this hospital placement, she’s still months away from the one-year vesting that’ll allow health insurance to kick in.
(The irony is not lost on us: a nurse, working at a hospital, who remain uninsured.)
Chastain’s slumped posture and frequently weary expression suggest a woman constantly battling total exhaustion. And yet Amy also radiates dignity and responsibility; she always lights up when with a patient, or comforting a family member; her ministrations are gentle, her compassion palpable.
She isn’t merely a “good” nurse; she’s a great nurse. Chastain delivers one of those “all in” performances that makes her every move and spoken word compelling, and authentic. She feels like somebody living next door.
We meet Amy as she tends to an elderly woman with a serious skin condition: uncomfortable and debilitating, but not life-threatening. Lindholm and Wilson-Cairns take their time in establishing Amy’s routine: both during her overworked and understaffed hospital shifts, and at home, where Maya has become frustrated by her mother’s prolonged daily absences.
Relief finally arrives when Charlie Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) joins her unit. Amy shows him the ropes; he adapts quickly to this late-night shift’s demands. Redmayne makes him affable, observant and — most particularly — empathetic. Amy and Charlie bond during these long nights; she trusts him with her heart issues, and he becomes something of a cheerleader.
And also a friend, spending daytime hours with Amy and her daughters, who adore him.
Then the elderly woman dies, quite unexpectedly.
Amy is surprised to learn, weeks later, that hospital “risk manager” Linda Garran (Kim Dickens, hissably soulless) has brought what has been labeled a “potentially suspicious death” to the attention of police detectives Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich) and Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha).
The detectives, at first mostly puzzled, can’t understand why Garran and hospital attorney Duncan Beattie (David Lavine, equally loathsome) waited seven weeks to contact them. Then they learn that the deceased woman’s husband has had her body cremated: ergo, no way to perform an autopsy.
Then Braun and Baldwin get very interested.
The story’s focus splits at this point, becoming equal parts police procedural and the evolving Amy/Charlie dynamic. Emmerich and Asomugha are both terrific as dogged investigators who become increasingly suspicious when their various requests — say, for several month’s worth of drug dispensing records — produce no more than thin folders.
Worse yet, supervisors above Braun and Baldwin’s pay grade insist that Garran be present during all staff interviews … and the detectives know full well that nobody will be wholly candid, with her in the room.
By this point — particularly as we think back to this film’s fleeting prologue — Redmayne’s carefully shaded performance has become … well … somewhat sinister. Amy takes him at face value, but to us he seems too nice. Too calculating.
Then another patient dies unexpectedly, and her opinion begins to shift; a flicker of doubt enters Chastain’s contemplative gaze. And we wonder what she’ll do next…
Wilson-Cairns has adhered rigorously to established fact; Loughren, Cullen, Braun and Baldwin are based on their named real-world counterparts. The various hospital patients and victims are fictitious, of necessity, but the manner of their deaths also is accurate … as is the fact that the actual hospital in question waited months to contact authorities, even after it had become blindingly obvious that something was seriously wrong.
Garran and Beattie also are fictitious, which allows Dickens to make the former impressibly obstructive and insensitive. We want to reach into the screen and throttle her.
The somewhat awkward dynamic between Chastain and young McDowell is persuasive, with Amy clearly heartbroken over the fact that — in the early scenes — her elder daughter feels somewhat abandoned. A later heart-to-heart is quite touching, when Amy decides to explain her medical condition to Maya, so the girl will know what to do in the event of an emergency.
Lindholm and production designer Shane Valentino also took pains to make the hospital activity look and sound correct; to that end, all the background actors are actual nurses and doctors, supplied by a casting agency.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment this film’s atmosphere shifts into thriller territory, after beginning as a seemingly ordinary hospital/relationship drama. But by the third act, the developing suspense has transformed Redmayne’s outwardly ordinary comments and mannerisms into something downright creepy.
I’ve always felt that one mark of a based-on-fact film’s success is the degree to which, after it concludes, viewers rush to research what actually happened.
In which case, Lindholm, Wilson-Cairns and the cast have done their job well.
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