‘Night Nurse’ Administers Pleasure but Mistakes Obfuscation for Depth

Security is lax at the high-end retirement community that is the setting of Georgia Bernstein’s “Night Nurse.” Casual bacchanals, replete with hard liquor and restorative IV bags, are, if not the standard, then possible. The nursing staff is composed of attractive young women who have few qualms about imbibing on the job. It is a small mercy, at least for those of us seated in the theater, that the elderly man hosting the party suffers from impotence. Those nurses would otherwise be eager to oblige.If a viewer didn’t know any better, the aforementioned scene might have been lifted from a drive-in triple-feature back in the halcyon days of 1973. But, no, Ms. Bernstein hasn’t looked for inspiration in deathless fare like Stephanie Rothman’s “The Student Nurses” (1970), but to Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), anything by Catherine Breillat, and the one-and-done neo-noir by Leonard Kastle, “The Honeymoon Killers” (1970). Yet the grindhouse is not this auteur’s bag. Those who hold exploitation films of yore in some esteem will have their patience tested by “Night Nurse.”Not that the picture is lacking in grubby doings or erotic undertows, but it is draped in a cultivated strain of art-house obfuscation, the kind of thing typically fobbed off as “Lynchian.” That hasn’t stopped “Night Nurse” from racking up impressive notices at the most recent iteration of the Sundance Film Festival and even from mainstream media outlets like the Los Angeles Times. “Recommending the film . . . ,” writes its critic Mark Olsen, “feels a little like an HR violation.”An enviable bit of phrasemaking, that, and one indicative of the movie’s bristling allure. Would that Ms. Bernstein had the wherewithal or the experience to endow her outrages with greater moral heft. The title sequence, a sinuous overview of an old school telephone cord winding its way along the contours of the title character, lets us know from the get-go that the director’s thumb is on the scale, that the boundaries being tested aren’t done out of necessity but out of will. A diminution of metaphorical resonance is the upshot.“Night Nurse” marks the debut of Cemre Paksoy, a striking Turkish-born actress whom El Greco would’ve given his eye-teeth to paint. Ms. Paksoy plays Eleni Sadik, a new hire at a luxury retirement community that caters, for the most part, to doddering old men. Mimi Rogers portrays the facility’s director Dr. Mann.She’s skittish, our heroine, and a few sidelong conversations hint at a troubled past. What those troubles might have been is never explained; as a result, Eleni’s increasingly erratic behavior lacks justification. Ms. Bernstein’s screenplay cruises on perversity to the detriment of dramatic rationale.When Eleni enters into a sexual and criminal relationship with a patient who’s garnered a reputation for manipulating the medical staff, Douglas Callum (Bruce McKenzie in a scary, star turn), we are left to wonder at its veracity. The dreamlike state in which the story unfolds, the most intriguing aspect of which is a phone scam engineered by Douglas and effected by Eleni, can’t sustain a narrative in which the actions of its protagonists are ultimately met with real world consequences. When Eleni subjugates herself to garner Douglas’s attention, Ms. Bernstein reveals herself to be a sensationalist, pure and simple.Lidia Nikonova’s anodyne cinematography helps to temper the sordid events on hand. For all its faults, there is a grim kind of pleasure to be gleaned from “Night Nurse,” mostly in the hope that Ms. Bernstein will follow up with something better suited to her talents.

‘Night Nurse’ Administers Pleasure but Mistakes Obfuscation for Depth

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