Petra Volpe’s “Late Shift,” a workplace thriller set in the cancer ward of a Swiss hospital, draws our attention to two objects: a new pair of sneakers, which nurse Floria (Leonie Benesch) whips out of the box at the beginning of the film; and a testy patient’s Rolex. Floria may be prepared to hit the ground running when she starts her shift, but time is not on her side — neither is it for the over two dozen patients waiting to start their surgeries, or get their medications, or finally talk to a doctor.
Here, you’ll get none of the spectacular injuries or group huddles of the TV series “The Pitt,” but “Late Shift” does, similarly, cover a single work rotation through the course of its running time. The focus is Floria, who tends to her duties as if performing a one-woman show. The Cinematographer Judith Kaufmann’s camera trails her with long, gliding shots that bring out the improvisational demands of her job: Getting painkillers for one patient means running into another’s demanding children in the hallway or catching yet another smoking a cigarette on the balcony. On top of this, one of three regular nurses is out sick, and a student nurse creates as many problems as she helps solve.
Benesch’s beautifully controlled performance — a balancing act of anxious, fidgety physicality and poker-faced concentration — shows us the difficulty of honoring each patient’s humanity when workplace conditions demand efficiency over empathy.
Still, this message runs thin as the story progresses, a bit too evenly, through its various cases, giving the film a languid, repetitious quality. Title cards at the end remind us that there is a global staffing shortage in the nursing industry, but the film’s basic message of facedown perseverance hardly matches this state of emergency.
Late Shift Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters.
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