The Good Nurse is based on the 2013 book of the same name by Charles Graeber that follows a nurse called Amy who suspects her colleague, nurse Charles Cullen, to be responsible for a series of mysterious deaths at Parkfield Memorial Hospital.
Featuring Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne in key roles, The Good Nurse focuses on the crimes of the real-life serial killer Charles Cullen who is suspected to be one of the most notorious serial killers in recorded history.
The Danish screenwriter and director, Tobias Lindholm, has directed the film while Krysty Wilson-Cairns, known for her screenplay of the 2019 war film 1917, has handled the writing. The film had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The Good Nurse Story Summary
Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) is a good nurse who loves helping her patients as much as she can even if it means getting an earful from the shift supervisor at Parkfield Memorial Hospital. She is kind enough to let the husband of an old lady stay in the ward overnight despite knowing that doing so is a sure-shot way to get a lecture from the supervisor about staff shortage.
Despite her kindness, life is not kind to Amy as she is at a high risk of getting a heart stroke. Moreover, she barely manages to earn enough from her job to pay the bills on time. As she is yet to complete one year at the hospital, Amy cannot even take paid leaves to rest, and she does not possess health insurance.
At work, she meets Charles Cullen aka Charlie (Eddie Redmayne), a new hire at the hospital who’s an experienced nurse as well. Amy and Charlie hit it off naturally as both share a similar compassionate outlook towards the patients, being ready to always help others at any instance.
One night, when Amy gets particularly exhausted, struggling to keep up with her duties, she informs Charlie about her heart condition but requests not to tell anybody as she would get fired if the hospital management came to know about her worsening health. Knowing Amy must just work for four months to get her health insurance, Charlie offers that he will help her.
The very next day, Amy discovers that Mrs. Martinez, the old lady whose husband she helped earlier, had passed away the previous night. Charlie takes the responsibility of readying Mrs. Martinez’s body while Amy leaves to have a conversation with the grief-stricken Mr. Martinez.
Seven weeks later, detectives Tim Braun (Noah Emmerich) and Danny Baldwin (Nnamdi Asomugha) are called up by the hospital authorities on the directives of the Health Department to investigate the suspicious death of Mrs. Martinez, who died due to a possible reaction to the medication given to her. Much to the shock of Braun and Baldwin, Mrs. Martinez’s body had been already cremated by the time the case came to them.
Through some preliminary investigation, the detectives find out that Charlie was charged with criminal trespassing and harassment in 1995. A post-it note on Charlie’s file says “Digoxin.” However, as the charges were dropped by Charlie’s co-worker, Charlie walked free without going through much.
In the presence of the hospital representative Ms. Linda Garran (Kim Dickens), the detectives call Amy to question her regarding Mrs. Martinez’s death. When Ms. Garran leaves the room for a while, the detectives present Mrs. Martinez’s medical records in front of Amy, who quickly observes that the insulin levels in the records were not normal, implying that Mrs. Martinez had been given insulin externally. Mrs. Martinez was a victim of a double medication error, a rare medical incident.
Although detectives Braun and Baldwin try to raise the matter of Charlie’s role in the death, Amy quickly rubbishes any such suspicion by claiming that Charlie is a good nurse. This claim also aligns with the great professional and personal relationship that Amy and Charlie have been sharing for the past months. Charlie has been attracting Amy’s sympathy by sharing with Amy details about his strained relationship with his ex-wife and the struggle for custody of his kids. Charlie even helps Amy with her medicines by using a fault in the PYXIS MedStation – an automatic medicine dispenser – to steal medicines.
On the other hand, the detectives try digging into Charlie’s history by talking to the management of St. Aloysius Hospital, Charlie’s former place of employment. But they do not get their hands on anything solid as the attorney refuses to share any confidential information. Detective Baldwin’s patience hits the ceiling when he receives only a single file from the Parkfield Memorial Hospital in the name of an internal investigation that lasted seven weeks.
Baldwin gets fed up when Ms. Garran provides the police with four weeks of records from the PYXIS MedStation, saying that the machine only stores reports for up to four weeks. Baldwin’s frustration gets both the detectives banned from the hospital premises as he ends up shouting at Ms. Garran, who uses her influence within the City Council to further create hurdles in the investigation. Although the detectives are stopped from entering the hospital premises, they find out that the medicine named Digoxin was given to Mrs. Martinez also.
The situation gets tenser for Amy as she witnesses the death of Kelly Anderson, another patient with a double medication error in her reports. When the two detectives approach Amy to get her assistance with the investigation, Amy mistakenly reveals the information about Kelly’s death to them. Braun and Baldwin’s suspicions about Charlie have grown stronger meanwhile as Charlie has worked in nine hospitals previously, all of which refuse to share any information about Charlie’s employment with the police.
The Good Nurse Ending Explained
When Amy discovers this anomaly in Charlie’s employment history from the detectives, she sets out to do a bit of her own investigation and decides to talk to Lori, a former friend who worked with Charlie previously. Thanks to Lori, Amy finds out that Charlie was rumored to have killed a patient. The patient also died due to an insulin overdose just like the patients at Parkfield who expired recently under similar circumstances. Lori also tells Amy that the number of deaths reduced drastically once Charlie left the hospital. Apparently, Charlie used saline bags to infuse insulin into the bloodstream of the patients.
Upon her recent discovery, Amy rushes to the hospital to check the saline bags and confirm whether they contained traces of insulin. Amy’s suspicions turn out to be true, but the panic leads to a breakdown for her, resulting in a brief stay at the hospital before she discharges herself quickly and returns home to escape Charlie’s presence.
Later, Amy meets the detectives to share her findings with the police. She tells Braun and Baldwin that Charlie infuses the saline bags with insulin which ends up poisoning the patients slowly over time, leading to their deaths. Through Amy, the detectives also confirm that Digoxin can also be mixed with saline to kill the patients. Further, the detectives are shocked to find out that the PYXIS MedStation stores the reports for longer than four weeks, unlike what they were told by Ms. Garran.
When Amy offers to get them the reports from the PYXIS station in her ward to prove that Charlie took insulin and Digoxin to poison the patients, the detectives reveal the real problem. As Mrs. Martinez’s body was cremated before the autopsy, the police had no evidence to prove that the death was caused by the said medications. Here, Amy takes the charge as she talks to Kelly Anderson’s husband Tom to let the police take out Kelly’s body and conduct an autopsy on her.
Thanks to Tom and Amy, the police find conclusive evidence that Kelly died due to an overdose of Digoxin and insulin. Amy helps the authorities with the PYXIS reports. However, the detectives come across an abnormality in the reports as the transactions show the medicine withdrawals were canceled.
Although Amy informs the police that it’s a flaw with the machine that Charlie utilized for his benefit, the police conclude that it’s inadequate to prove Charlie’s guilt. By canceling the medicine withdrawal at the last moment, Charlie used to get his hands on the medicines while the transactions would show up as canceled in the official reports. Amy concludes that Ms. Garran is aware of Charlie’s actions as she used to be a nurse before she assumed her current role.
Did The Police Arrest Charles Cullen?
Getting a whiff of the direction in which the police investigation was heading, in an attempt to shed responsibility for any liability, Ms. Garran decides to fire Charlie for misreporting details about his previous employment. Braun and Baldwin identify that the investigation is heading the same path that has kept Charlie in the shadows for so long. Every hospital had attempted to hide Charlie’s crimes for the sake of its reputation, letting Charlie run free as he murdered innocent patients.
On returning home that day, Amy finds Charlie playing with her kids. Knowing that Charlie could be more dangerous in an emotional state of mind, Amy handles him carefully and gets rid of him by making the excuse of her kids.
Later, Amy calls up Charlie and arranges a lunch with him to get a confession while the police listen to the conversation between the two. In an attempt to gain Charlie’s trust, Amy tries to make him believe that she wouldn’t judge him for his actions. But despite Amy’s many attempts, Charlies does not budge. However, the police manage to get a warrant to hold Charlie for 48 hours.
Detective Baldwin and Detective Braun attempt to manipulate Charlie into giving a confession, but Charlie avoids answering any questions that would implicate him in the murders. If the detectives do not extract a confession in 48 hours, they will have to release Charlie. Aware of this reality, Amy decides to talk to Charlie in the interrogation room.
Amy thanks Charlie for being there for her when she needed him the most and asks his forgiveness for going behind his back. Amy exhibits that she understands Charlie’s loneliness but seeks truth in return. Having found a true friend in Amy so far, Charlie accepts his crimes. He reveals that he murdered multiple patients in various hospitals. When asked for a reason, Charlie claims that he continued killing people because nobody ever stopped him.
In the end, Charles Cullen pleaded guilty to killing 29 people in order to avoid a death sentence. Although he never revealed his true motivation to kill the patients, it’s believed that he murdered nearly 400 people over the years.
Presently, he is serving 18 life sentences in the New Jersey State Prison and will not be eligible for parole until 2403. In the sixteen years of Charlie’s career as a nurse, many hospitals came across Charlie’s crimes but none pursued the leads to hold him guilty for his crime.
Importantly, none of the hospitals that hid Charles Cullen’s crimes were prosecuted for covering up the suspicious circumstances revolving around the deaths. On the other hand, Amy got her heart surgery and continues to live happily with her two kids, being the good nurse that she was always.
The Good Nurse is now streaming on Netflix.
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