Writer-director Georgia Bernstein’s feature debut, Night Nurse, appears to fit within a poetic label once afforded to Claire Denis: this erotic thriller bears a sense of “voluptuous austerity” in its exploration of power dynamics and kink. But whereas Stephen Holden employed this description admiringly with regard to 1999’s Beau Travail, this writer conjures it for 2026’s Night Nurse with great caution.
We are immediately thrust into the utopian, manicured environment of a (presumably Floridian) retirement community, from the pool and physical therapy complex to the modestly sized but well-furnished standalone houses that make up the residential sector. Bernstein’s directorial gaze is enamored with closed-in framing of limbs interlocking in the pool — the younger, glossier skin of the nurses makes contact with the contoured, textured skin of the elderly residents, guiding them in their PT exercise of merely walking laps through waist-deep water. Notably, emphasis is placed on the dom-sub relationship of a fit, spritely healthcare worker commanding the movement of their frailer patient, pinching their skin a bit too tight and steering their path through the pool a bit too forcefully. A provocative juxtaposition that grows ever so stranger from this point on.
Eleni, played by the intoxicating Cemre Paksoy, is a last-minute hire. She is reserved, skittish, and, as observed by the authorial Dr. Mann (Mimi Rogers), quite inexperienced. In dialogue with the other nurses, Eleni is also revealed to have a vaguely troubled history, which positions her as an unravelling force for when the film ramps up its BDSM roleplay. Very quickly after these opening moments, and admittedly unconvincingly, Eleni becomes a feral, submissive subject to her assigned patient Douglas, a chain-smoking, wife-beater-wearing, unpredictable “cool grandpa” type in the early throes of dementia, played chillingly by stage actor Bruce McKenzie. A recurring motif in their dynamic becomes the cord of a landline, establishing a sense of danger not only through the communication it serves to channel, but as literal binding material for dom and sub; Douglas enjoys, as one does, wrapping the phone cord around Eleni and shoving the phone to her ear, coercing her into assuming the persona of a frightened granddaughter to the elderly prey on the other line, orgasmically pleading for help, that her captors demand ransom money for her safe return.
Along the way, many of the other young nurses party with Eleni and Douglas at his house, deriving pleasure from taking his meds, injecting his IV drip, drinking his alcohol, and generally plunging into a mass stupor along with him. Eleni grows jealous and neglected as a result, reduced at this point to a Gollum-esque figure crawling from room to room, leering at others from behind couches. Bernstein has a solid handle on the cool, distant visual atmosphere of these sequences, competently keeping the kink-parade in full throttle and further descending into what eventually becomes flat-out violence. Upsetting and unearned violence.
Here’s where we should return to Holden’s “voluptuous austerity” idea. Denis’ films often engage with the voluptuous dimension at a remove; there is always sensuous poetry in what she is rather austerely depicting. It’s like bearing witness — from the frigid, metallic nose-bleed seats of a stadium — to an all-consuming sensory experience of love, sex, and emotion more broadly, in all its tenderness and violence and mundanity and opacity and sometimes downright animalistic rage. You, as a viewer, are having your own guttural nature laid bare before you, but Denis takes that a step further by alienating you from it. Bernstein attempts to tap into this aesthetic on her own terms, but the execution mostly just achieves austerity without the voluptuous. By the concluding frames of Night Nurse, an unfortunate thing becomes clear to the viewer: that the two deeply disturbed leads remain about as developed as an empty mortar shell, and that we have been asked to smile along with them.
DIRECTOR: Georgia Bernstein; CAST: Cemre Paksoy, Bruce McKenzie, Eléonore Hendricks, Colleen Rose Trundy, Mimi Rogers; DISTRIBUTOR: Independent Film Company; IN THEATERS: July 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
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