The film is currently out in theaters for a limited run, but it will also be coming to Netflix for viewers to enjoy in their own homes. Here’s what you need to know about the movie.
All You Need to Know About ‘The Good Nurse’ Netflix Release Date
Directed by Tobias Lindholm, the true crime film depicts the life of Amy Loughren, a night nurse who becomes friends with new co-worker Charles Cullen. When several unexplained deaths begin to occur at their work similar to a number of deaths at the hospitals where Cullen had been employed, he becomes a suspect and Loughren works with the police to try and persuade him to confess.
The real-life Cullen is currently serving 18 consecutive life sentences in prison for the deaths of 29 patients, but authorities believe he is behind the deaths of 400 patients.
The Good Nurse debuted in theaters on October 19 across North America, but it won’t be long until the film will be made available to Netflix subscribers.
The drama is based on Charles Graeber’s book about Cullen, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder. It will land on the streaming platform just one week after its theatrical release on Wednesday, October 26.
Speaking to Newsweek about making the drama, director Lindholm explained that he wanted to take the focus away from the killer and instead put it on the woman who caught him with kindness.
“We are in a time where this darkness we seem to be obsessed to look into is more and more hollow,” Linholm said.
“I think that it’s part of human life, to look into the darkness, our fears are part of the way we navigate life. Life is basically about what we hope and what we fear, and then we try to find our way through. This story was exactly about what we hoped for, that humanity could come instead of being a story about violence beating down violence. It’s a story about how charity, kindness and humanity stopped something that a whole system couldn’t do.
“And that was a story I hadn’t seen before and it kind of took what is a beaten genre, of serial killer movies, and it gave us an opportunity to tell a very different story, which was inspiring.”
Krysty Wilson-Cairns, who wrote the script, also told Newsweek about the process of adapting Graeber’s book for the screen, saying that the biography of killer Cullen was “all-encompassing” but it was Loughren’s part in it that stood out.
“I think in the last third of the book you had Amy, you reach her story, and I remember thinking, working-class, single mom struggling, and is the last person that should have to take on this role of catching a serial killer,” Wilson-Cairns said. “It should be the hospital system, it should be the cops up, all these people. And it’s her, it’s left to her, and in a way, she’s the only one that can do it.
“The story, for me, it’s always been Amy. That was the story I pitched, that was the story that Darren Aronofsky’s company bought […] I think before I met him, I was like, ‘Oh, God, what if he wants to tell a different version of this book?’ But I was very lucky, we were so aligned. There was always going to be Amy’s story.
“And he was like ‘Let’s nail truth to the masthead. Anything that’s in it that’s even slightly salacious, slightly invented, even anything that feels that way if it’s true, let’s pull it all back down. Let’s make it feel really real, and that you’re moving through time with her.’ And I think that’s the trick to everything that works in the film, and I’m very glad to have worked with him.”
The Good Nurse is in theaters now. It will be released on Netflix on Wednesday, October 26.
