The Good Nurse review: The call is coming from inside the ER

If biology really is destiny, Eddie Redmayne's face makes a fantastic case for innocence: The man is a marble faun, a freckled daisy, a milky shard of English porcelain so delicate and winsome he couldn't possibly be anything but blameless. That disconnect brings a great, discomfiting tension to The Good Nurse, a methodical and smartly wrought psychological thriller that plays in limited release this week before arriving on Netflix Oct. 26.

Redmayne plays the real-life intensive-care nurse Charles Cullen, whose notorious story is easy enough to Google, though refreshing the details is hardly a prerequisite; it's enough to know that in 2002 he landed at the same New Jersey hospital as a fellow nurse named Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain), working nights on the emergency ward. Amy is the kind of R.N. who treats bedside manner as at least half the job; she's unfailingly kind and cheerful, and conscientious to a fault. She's also got two little girls at home she hardly gets to see — their dad, neither seen nor identified, is a non-factor — and a serious heart condition she can't reveal to her employers or even treat until her insurance kicks in several months down the road.

Enter Charles, the dream coworker: Amiable, empathetic, and eager to help, he materializes at Parkfield Memorial like a gift from the night-shift gods, immediately leaning in to carry the load of his overextended coworkers. Soon Charles and Amy's easy rapport has spilled over from carpooling and shared midnight meals to a sort of quasi family life with her daughters at home, though their friendship remains strictly platonic; he's still dealing with the afterburn of an ugly divorce, and unsteady custody of two girls of his own. But isn't it strange that so many patients in the hospital's care — an elderly woman with a hardly life-threatening skin condition, a seemingly healthy new mom — keep coding out and dying?

A pair of local police officers (Nnamdi Asomugha and The Americans'Noah Emmerich) are brought in to investigate one of those incidents, though their presence is treated mostly as a pesky formality: Parkfield executives have already conducted their own internal review, and seem oddly resistant to supplying any kind of documentation, or even a body. (Fear the Walking Dead's Kim Dickens, her blooming panic barely contained beneath a placid middle-management exterior, makes for a canny model of queasy corporate fealty á la Michael Clayton-era Tilda Swinton.) Chastain, tremulous yet determined, brings something gratifyingly grounded to her everywoman hero, and an eerie, pitch-perfect Redmayne, wearing Charlie's nice-guy drag like a battering ram, lets his mask slip so incrementally that the final scenes feel like a true terrifying rupture.

Danish director Tobias Lindholm (A War), working from a lean, unfussy script by 1917 screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns, shapes his story like an elevated docudrama, nimbly drawing out the thriller elements even as he settles comfortably into the small domestic details of Amy's world, and the more traditional cop-procedural overtones of Asomugha and Emmerich's stymied efforts to further their case. It feels like a faint insult to say that The Good Nurse could be a premium-cable product from long ago, one of those lightly prestige-y Sunday-night movies Showtime or HBO used to make. But it's also one crafted with sturdy, consummate skill, burnished by two Oscar winners who don't stint on their performances just because most people will end up seeing Nurse on a small screen. And when, exactly, did that kind of filmmaking stop being more than good enough? Grade: B+

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