While it may as well be the national genre of choice for storytelling here in Australia, and I grew up with my mother being especially interested in it, true crime doesn’t hold any inherent interest for me personally. I tend to avoid documentaries on the subject, since I don’t particularly like the idea of choosing to occupy my free time with the stories of people who actually got hurt or killed; this is part of the reason why I cling so tightly onto the more speculative genres like sci-fi and horror, where any injuries are pure fiction. But even with that in mind, I went into this hoping for some good just out of the casting, between Eddie Redmayne seriously impressing with his last film The Trial Of The Chicago 7, and Jessica Chastain’s recent career highlight in The Eyes Of Tammy Faye. And yeah, there’s good to it, but I unfortunately struggled to maintain interest in the whole package.
This is the English-language debut for director Tobias Lindholm, better known for his collaborations with Thomas Vinterberg on films like The Commune and Another Round. The way he and DP Jody Lee Lipes visualise this story of a medical murder drama carries that characteristic coldness that I associate with the work of Nordic filmmakers like the Alfredson brothers. It works for showing a place that supposed to be about healing and people doing good for others in its primary hospital setting as somewhere dangerous and unsettling, but I’d argue that the pacing doesn’t go far enough in getting that dread across.
The acting doesn’t help with that. Redmayne as the sinister nurse Charles Cullen matches the presentation in his emotional deadness and detachment, but he never reaches what I would’ve thought would be an expected point where his presence raises the tension of the film. In the scenes between him and Jessica Chastain as fellow nurse Amy, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should be much more afraid for something happening to Amy than I ultimately was.
In the film’s defence, though, that’s largely the result of the way the film frames Charles and his actions; namely, by mainly keeping him out of it. This is about as far a modern true crime serial killer dramatisation can get in not glorifying the killer and his actions, since Amy is the undisputed main character and the deaths themselves are shot so that the victims maintain all dignity. They’re not here to be dispatched in pleasingly graphic ways; their deaths are a fucking tragedy, and the film actively holds those responsible to account.
This includes what ends up being the real villain of this story, and it’s not Charles. Instead, it’s the hospital administration that continued to cover up his actions, just to keep their own reputation in check. To that end, we have Kim Dickens as Linda, the risk manager at the hospital Charles and Amy both work at, and the extent to which she roadblocks the investigation into the deaths is… honestly, and I don’t even know if this was the intended effect or not, but I wound up feeling more ire towards her and what she represented than Charles himself.
The idea of people knowing about what Charles was doing, of the dozens of deaths he confessed to and the potential hundreds it’s suggested he committed beyond that, and that they decided to do nothing in response is quite sickening. It hit the same raw nerve I usually feel when reading up on how Catholic priests get shuffled between parishes by the Church to cover sexual abuse scandals, not to mention that incident I brought up last year when looking at Dear Evan Hansen.
Now, as easy as it is for me to read this as someone taking the bad-faith facetious argument of “maybe society is the real serial killer” seriously, credit is still due here for how the film handles its based-on-real-travesty story. It still doesn’t work for me aesthetically, as this kind of Nordic drama isn’t exactly to my tastes, and the acting was good but not necessarily in the areas I felt it needed to be good to make the story work to its fullest. But it still makes for an interesting change of pace that for a sub-genre of biopic that regularly runs into criticisms of glamorising the subject, and the questions it raises are still worth taking into consideration.
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