The Good Nurse writer on “truly terrifying” Eddie Redmayne scene

By Patrick Cremona

Published: Friday, 21 October 2022 at 12:00 am

New film The Good Nurse – which is currently playing in select UK cinemas before joining Netflix next week – is by no means your stereotypical serial killer thriller.

The film stars Jessica Chastain as Amy Loughren, an overworked nurse who slowly begins to realise that her friend and colleague Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) is responsible for a number of mysterious deaths at the hospital where they both work.

It is based on a chilling true story, and screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns recently explained in an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com why they decided not to sensationalise it in any way – and how that ensured one scene featuring Redmayne was all the more terrifying.

“In the beginning, you sort of want to fall into these thriller or horror tropes,” she explained of the adaptation process. “Like, you want there to be this and that, because you’ve been so saturated by these movies all your life, and very rarely does one break the convention of that.”

On this occasion, however, Wilson-Cairns wanted to keep the truth in the script as much as possible, and this more grounded, pared-back approach was endorsed by director Tobias Lindholm.

“We shared that vision, and he wanted to take it to its absolute limit. He was like, what if we put in nothing invented? Like, what if we don’t add anything for horror? What if we just let the fact that this happened, and the silence and the oppression of these sorts of conversations… they’re gonna be terrifying.

“And that was really, I think, the core of letting this be a real and terrifying drama. There’s so little violence in it, there’s almost no gore, apart from like, the medical stuff that you see at hospitals.”