Capturing the Killer Nurse bookends Netflix’s Killer Nurse Saga, which began a few weeks back with The Good Nurse, a rock-solid drama starring Jessica Chastain as the woman who helped end a long string of murders committed by a serial killer nurse played by Eddie Redmayne. It was a BOATS (Based On A True Story) movie, and the real-life story was apparently too juicy for Netflix not to make a true-crime documentary out of it. So here it is – and here we are, determining which of the two films is less necessary.
‘CAPTURING THE KILLER NURSE’: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: The first voice we hear is Charles Cullen’s. Charles Cullen, the former nurse who admitted to killing a few dozen hospital patients with medication, and may have been responsible for a few hundred more. And it’s really his voice, taken from archival audio, saying he committed these murders as an act of mercy: “At times, the only thing I could do was to try to end their suffering,” he says. Don’t believe it.
Then, the subtitle: MARCH, 2003, SOMERVILLE, NEW JERSEY. Cullen had been working at Somerset Medical Center. He and fellow nurses Amy Loughren (played by Chastain in The Good Nurse) and Donna Hargreaves called themselves the “three musketeers” of the ICU. Loughren and Hargreaves attest to Cullen’s knowledge, experience and bedside manner, and how he made them laugh. Cullen and Loughren became friends, strengthened by a secret she shared with him – she was suffering from cardiomyopathy, and keeping that fact from her employers so she could keep her health insurance, and working to support her daughters. She got to know him; “I always felt he was the guy who was bullied,” Loughren says.
Then, one of their patients suddenly passed. The Reverend Gall had been administered a toxic dose of digoxin. This is when we meet two cops, Danny Baldwin and Tim Braun, who investigated the death, and were met with resistance from the hospital’s “risk management” person. The doc starts working backwards, to the nine hospitals and a nursing home where Cullen had worked previously; we meet the niece of a woman who likely was killed by Cullen in the mid-1990s, and a nurse who worked with Cullen in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and says he may have been responsible for as many as 40 deaths.
Baldwin and Braun had their work cut out for them – they had some pieces of the puzzle, but no witnesses, no security-cam footage, no crime scenes to investigate, no bodies and no hospital officials willing to participate in the investigation, fearing legal and public-relations ramifications. We also meet an administrator from the local New Jersey poison control center, who sums it up: “The business of health care was one that Charles Cullen was perfectly suited for.” Weeks pass. The detectives finally get a break while interviewing Loughren without her superiors standing over her shoulder. They show her the information they’ve gathered. She comes to a horrible realization. And she agrees to help in any way she can, her own health be damned.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Bottom line, The Good Nurse is a far superior telling of Loughren’s story. If that’s not enough for you, there’s enough true-crime serial killer content on Netflix to keep a person in a deep dark pit of the worst of humanity for weeks: Richard Ramirez, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy fodder fills the menus.
Performance Worth Watching: Loughren is an unerringly earnest voice who repeatedly insists that Cullen was killing just to kill, and not out of some twisted sense of compassion for suffering patients.
Memorable Dialogue: Loughren describes the look in Cullen’s eyes when she confronted him about his deeds: “It wasn’t darkness, it wasn’t a monster, it was just nothingness.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Capturing the Killer Nurse makes you feel queasy from the moment you first hear Cullen’s voice – and the feeling only gets worse as it suffocates us with the type of overwrought wordless reenactments and sinister music we’d see in exploitative sub-basic-cable true crime dreck. The cheap and tacky visual approach is an attempt to manipulate us even more than director Tobias Lindhomd did with The Good Nurse, which, despite its light fictionalizing of the story, maintained a nicely grounded docudrama tone. There’s no argument which of the two films is more worthy of your time.
Which is too bad, because Killer Nurse director Tim Travers Hawkins has a collection of credible talking heads at his disposal, including Loughren, Baldwin and Braun, and author Charles Graeber, the Cullen expert who wrote the book The Good Nurse. The doc exists purely as a sister piece to Lindholm’s film, Netflix hoping to pique viewers’ curiosity with a history-vs.-Hollywood compare-and-contrast package. Hawkins has an opportunity to expand upon the story and more intently examine how a health care system nurtured and enabled a serial killer – likely the most prolific in history – while ignoring its own moral commitments to the greater good of society. But the documentary is content to loosely piece together a timeline of events you could just as easily read on Wikipedia, instead of digging deeper into the larger implications of the story.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Capturing the Killer Nurse is a sub-par reiteration of pretty much the same story told with greater insight and drama in The Good Nurse. Watch that instead.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Capturing the Killer Nurse’ on Netflix, a Tacky Documentary Reiterating the Same Story as ‘The Good Nurse’ appeared first on Decider.
