OKLAHOMA CITY – Have you ever seen someone do something unforgiveable (or, god forbid, had something done to you) and thought “what kind of awful, depraved person would do such a thing?”
Well, the uncomfortably odd indie “Night Nurse” is here to give you a glimpse into exactly that kind of dark, hollow psyche.
The debut feature from writer/director Georgia Bernstein, “Night Nurse” is a strange animal, to be sure. Unique enough to defy any easy categorization and built largely from concepts and tones that are each off-putting enough on their own, but that fit together to create something intriguingly unsettling and nearly impossible to look away from.
It might be a crime film, though it deals entirely with the residents and staff of an elderly community and it’s tough to even tell what’s real or what’s happening. It might be an erotic thriller in the 90s cable vein, though there’s absolutely no outright sex and no sensuality designed for anything but dread and ill portent.
It might even be a pseudo-Lynchian experiment in dreamlike psychology, though there’s no surrealism, no dream logic. There’s just the discomfiting haze of something being off, something ungraspably awry.
A sheepish, mysterious young woman named Eleni takes a new job as a live-in overnight nurse in an elderly community and becomes drawn to a strangely magnetic old man named Douglas that may or may not be fully faking senility in order to get a cushy paid home and access to young women and drugs.
Without warning or understanding, Eleni is quickly drawn into Douglas’ world of parties, lies, and manipulation, centering on his aggressive, squirmingly sexual insistence that Eleni call the other elderly residents of the community late and night pretending to be a granddaughter that needs money to pay kidnappers or get out of jail.
And if even just reading that makes you recoil, rest assured that the pervertedly erotic way that Bernstein presents it is far more uncomfortable.
But it’s also a very real and very common con that’s been exploiting the elderly and stealing untold thousands or millions in recent years. It’s so common, in fact, that a real instance is what allegedly inspired Bernstein to create “Night Nurse,” when her own grandmother was nearly taken in by that exact scenario.
It left her wondering, like we all have, “what kind of awful, depraved person would do such a thing?”
And it’s important to understand that that’s the question driving “Night Nurse” from beginning to end.
It’s not meant to be erotic, it’s not meant to dramatize or unpack the crimes, and it’s not meant to dig into the damages at the core of these damaged people.
It’s just a portrait of sociopathy, an attempt to answer that “what kind of people” question by actually showing them to you in their private, uncomfortable, unexplainable moments, with their blood and tensions rising and their inhibitions and injurious urges spiraling like a coiled phone cord.
You’re simply watching warped people, trying at every turn to see how much further they can push their influence over their neighbors, over their connections to one another, and even over themselves and their own senses of decency or self-preservation.
Until, inevitably, real consequences begin to muddy the waters of their fun and their psyches begin to unravel along with their limits.
And through it all, you’re not really even sure who you’re watching.
Eleni is mostly a mystery, with no background or establishing constraints, and even a moment of clear declaration that anything she’s ever been before right now, in this moment that we’re seeing her, is irrelevant and shed. And Douglas likewise remains an unanswered question, the audience never quite sure if he’s really losing his grasp on reality or if he’s still just faking for his own selfish fun.
It could all be very “Natural Born Killers,” then, framing Douglas and Eleni as unhinged, perverted grifters in a gritty portrait of a despicable criminal element.
But that’s not how Bernstein presents it, and it’s surely not how stars Cemre Paksoy and Bruce McKenzie play it.
Instead, it’s all gorgeously, cleanly composed, pristine as a fresh, white nurse uniform, and shot in the evocatively high-contrast, emotionally detached language of modern horror, almost Fincher-esque.
Paksoy and McKenzie lean into the cold, hypnotic tone, their dialogue filled with more long pauses than words at times, and every line reading like a non-sequiter.
They’re both genuinely fantastic, with McKenzie finally able to stretch his wings and his skills after a long lifetime of smaller bit roles, and Paksoy crashing the gates in her first-ever feature role, demonstrating a knack for spiraling, sociopathic desperation.
It’s the kind of disorientingly off-kilter story that you can’t predict, but you know that whatever finale or conclusion to which it’s leading is bound to be bad, and well, you’d be right.
Despite the anger and humanistic confusion that spawned the film – Bernstein’s disbelief that someone could be so soulless to prey on the innocent and infirm so – she’s ended up delivering one of the most effective and unapologetic portraits of pure sociopathy to cross screens in some time.
There’s no morality play, no attempt at remorse or revelation, and no attention paid to the victims left in their wake.
There’s also no real fun and no respite from the achingly slow-ratcheting tensions and unspooling sanities.
There’s just two people that want to break the rules and then get away with it. But it’s all offered to you with such striking, rich photography and such a hypnotic pace and tone that it could become almost impossible not to drift into that same wake and find yourself a victim of that same hypnotic coldness and mysterious selfishness.
At least for the viewers that can stomach it.
“Night Nurse” is now playing at Harkins Bricktown and AMC Quail Springs in Oklahoma City.
Catch Brett Fieldcamp’s film column weekly for information and insights into the world of film in the Oklahoma City metro and Oklahoma. | Brought to you by the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Brett Fieldcamp is the owner and Editor in Chief of Oklahoma City Free Press. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly two decades and served as Arts & Entertainment Editor before purchasing the company from founder Brett Dickerson in 2026.
He is also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
