“Night Nurse,” about a senior citizen in a luxury elder-care facility and the nurses he enlists in a scam, is a dreamy, sinister yet strangely tender movie. The style is part film noir, part super-stylish arthouse psychological drama (picture something along the lines of “sex, lies, and videotape”). Written and directed by Georgia Bernstein, it takes its sweet time telling a slight story. The slightness doesn’t seem to bother the actors or filmmakers even a little bit, and gives itself permission to luxuriate in a moment or an image.
The movie jumps into its premise immediately, introducing the heroine, Eleni Sadik (Cemre Paksoy), as she participates in a phone scam. The perpetrator calls a senior citizen pretending to be a grandchild, then milks them for cash to pay a nonexistent bail bond so they won’t have to stay in jail until arraignment. The camera very slowly crawls along the ultra-long, spirally cord of a landline phone wrapped around Eleni while an older man whose face is not shown gives her lines and notes and stays close to her—post-coitally close, you could say, although both parties are clothed.
Then we follow Eleni on her first day as a nurse at the facility. The sequence starts with nurses in bathing suits escorting seniors around the shallow end of a swimming pool while Eleni silently watches from a glassed-in observation area. One of the seniors is a scruffy but handsome man wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette, which is not normally something one does during pool time. (Details like the characters all calling on landline phones and the indoor cigarette smoking suggest that the “film “Night Nurse” is set in some unspecified past.) The way Bernstein and cinematographer Lidia Nikonova shoot the scene, concentrating on bodies and avoiding faces, emphasizes that men are all ravaged by time while the nurses are thirty to forty years younger.
Cemre is a slim, wide-eyed, twentysomething woman with long, dark, wavy hair and a face that Johannes Vermeer would have loved to paint. The way she plays Eleni makes the character seem withdrawn. We wonder if it’s the result of some trauma. But she does such a good job of hiding the problems that she could pass as someone who’s merely shy and watchful.
Elini’s guide during her first day is Mona (Eleonore Hendricks), an experienced nurse who will become a key player in Elini’s story. Mona has a special bond with the man who looked up at Elini. His name is Douglas (Bruce McKenzie). He was the guy we heard in the opening scene. He was committed to the facility preemptively because his chaotic behavior at home suggested the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Douglas is shown taking a cognitive impairment test early in the story and (mostly) passing it, but Douglas plays him, so we aren’t sure how bad his condition is or if he even has it.
What follows is a psychosexual character study with a noir mentality. The story might be new to cinema. We’ve seen lots of older characters getting scammed by much younger ones, but not a senior exploiting other seniors. Douglas is also very charismatic and, to certain women, sexy despite the age gap. He’s one of those guys who knows how to make other people feel like he’s in charge even when he isn’t.
In the wee hours of the morning, Douglas makes a move on Eleni in one of the facility’s kitchens. She doesn’t object. She seems excited. She’s breaking a taboo, likely one that she’s broken before. We may wonder whether Elini has what are colloquially referred to as “daddy issues,” and whether that’s why she applied for work at an elder care facility. She could also be a sexual abuse survivor. We don’t know. We can only intuit and project.
One thing’s for sure: Douglas knows how to get into the minds of women like Eleni. It’s implied that he and Mona have been intimate. As the story continues, Douglas recruits other young women into his mini-colony of crime, which makes Eleni uncomfortable and jealous, but not so much that she wants to leave. There’s a tour de force scene where Douglas entertains an entire group of nurses with an activity I won’t mention here because it’s clever and logical. The dynamics in the room feel cult-like, with Douglas as the patriarchal figurehead and the nurses as potential additions to an ever-growing harem. (Is he named after Michael Douglas, who became a star playing ruthless, lustful, ethically challenged men?)
Bernstein directs her actors to knockout performances, and guides her crew into devising a clean, minimalist, hypnotic style. “Night Nurse” is somewhere between film noir in color and one of those jagged, sometimes explicit French dramas where the director will park the camera on characters who are descending to the lower depths of life, and stay on them until the scene begins to feel like pornography
The result is an indie with such a tiny budget that feels bigger because the actors have the confidence of movie stars and the production is ingenious. Bernstein faked an elder care facility inside and outside of her grandmother’s house. There’s a scene in an intensive care room where we never see any other part of the hospital; it could just be a hospital bed and medical equipment placed in front of a wall that’s been painted a sickly green. I’m not sure if a police car that shows up at the facility is an actual police car or a civilian car shot in fragmented closeups with flashing blue-and-red lights selling us on the idea of “police car.” The jazz score by Steven Jackson and Sam Clapp adds so much that it should be considered the final draft of the script. It complements Elina’s pliability and Douglas’ unknowability, and adds layers of elegance and decadence. Parts of it evoke neo-noir classics like “The Long Goodbye” and “Body Heat.”
If I were teaching a class on how to make a small film seem big, this would be part of it. The camera never shows you anything except that which is essential to the story. And, in general, the script, direction, and performances give you just enough story and characterization to complete the movie in your mind. The dreamy tone and anywhere-yet-nowhere setting help in this regard, signaling that we should take the film seriously but not literally.
The big problem is that “Night Nurse” is told in a way that favors atmosphere and implied psychology over plot, no matter what, and is so committed to that approach that a few scenes feel like they’re mainly trying to hold your attention. Late in the film, when the hands of fate turn into fists and start breaking this world apart, it maintains its opium-den vibe. It continues to drift when it ought to be speeding up, not because of any deficiency in vision or execution, but because the movie feels like it’s ready to end. Nevertheless, this is a debut feature worth seeing and savoring, not just for its real and substantial achievements, but for the many bright futures it contains.
