‘The Good Nurse’ Refuses To Romanticise Its Serial Killer
Your 'Dahmer' antidote is here.
Given Netflix’s recent penchant for portraits of serial killers, it is perhaps a welcome development that The Good Nurse offers us the most mundane portrayal of a killer that you’ve ever seen.
— Spoiler warning: This article contains spoilers for ‘The Good Nurse’ —
The new film, which dropped on Netflix last month, marks a welcome departure from the romanticised depictions of serial killing seen in the likes of Dahmer (2022) and You (2015). Both are drawn-out TV series that put a conventionally attractive actor at their helm — Evan Peters plays our titular cannibal in Dahmer and Penn Badgley, our misogynistic killer in You.
Typically, serial killers are put front and centre– the protagonists of their own little killing sprees. As audience members we’re naturally coaxed to empathise: to gush over their degree of intellect, search for explanations, and adorn them with benefits of the doubt.
All of this extends, even, to romanticisation. Large swathes of the audience for Dahmer and You admit that they found these charmingly misunderstood killers attractive. While Netflix jokingly admonished audiences for gushing over Peters’ portrayal of real-life serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in a now-deleted tweet, you have to wonder if solely blaming audiences — rather than the creative decisions that arguably encourage that very mode of viewing — is fair.
people need to stop treating jeffery dahmer like he's a fictional character in ahs just cause he's played by evan peters. he's a real fucking murderer with real fucking victims, quit sexualizing and stanning him
— rigs ✮ (@feisrumor) September 23, 2022
The uniqueness of The Good Nurse is that it refuses to romanticise or even centre its serial killer. The film is based on the true story of Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne), who worked as a nurse across several hospitals in the US and administered lethal substances to his patients on the sly. Bucking recent trends, the film focuses on the life of the titular nurse Amy (Jessica Chastain) — the woman who worked with police to get him arrested.
In The Good Nurse, we see serial killing as emphatically unglamorous. We are not privy to Charles’ hospital bed executions, which involved the mundane process of adding clear fluids to other clear fluids. In contrast, Dahmer memorably opened with Evan Peters washing a bloody knife under a sink tap, and Season 3 of You featured a sex scene between Joe (Penn Badgley) and Love (Victoria Pedretti) covered in the blood of their latest victim. Both shows use violence to shock and titillate their audience; so it shouldn’t be a surprise when audience members start to view these characters with a degree of fascination; maybe even awe.
In The New Yorker, Parul Seghal identifies a modern literary trend known as the “the trauma plot” — the impulse to give characters traumatic backstories that often invoke strained childhoods. Whether that be the taxidermy flashbacks of Dahmer or the classic ‘bad mother’ narrative evoked in You, the childhood flashback exists for viewers to draw a line between the past and present — to attribute a cause to violence, and maybe even excuse it.
“With the trauma plot, the logic goes,” Seghal writes. “Evoke the wound and we will believe that a body, a person, has borne it.” Characters haunted by the spectre of trauma are becoming so ubiquitous, she adds, it’s as though they are “created in order to be dispatched into the past.”
The Good Nurse, however, remains unflinchingly in the present day, and Charles’ penchant for ending the lives of already hospitalised patients is portrayed as inscrutable as it is uninteresting. When Amy tearfully asks Charles at the police station why he killed the patients he did, his response is anything but elucidating. “I just did it,” he manages. “They didn’t stop me.”
And while Charles was shown during questioning to display strange behaviour that included bursts of agitation; with passing references to choosing female victims that remind him of his ex-wife; the movie doesn’t indulge our desire to ‘understand’ him — it doesn’t provide us, as Seghal puts it, with “locks and keys.”
Instead, we are forced too to sit in the discomfort of not knowing why Cullen killed the many patients he did; our expectation for an explanatory backstory wholly subverted. Because why invoke the childhood of a man who was trained to take care of people, and instead ended their lives while in his care?
Like most violent killers, Cullen doesn’t deserve the dignity of an explanatory framework. By spending its time focusing on the patients who he murdered, and the woman who stopped him in his tracks, we are left perceiving him in the only way that killers should be: inexplicable; and ultimately, pathetic.
Reena Gupta is Junkee’s culture writer. Follow her on Twitter.