An elderly woman dies, and her three adult sons cling to each other, weeping, before turning on the duty nurse. She hadn’t seen their mother once, they blurt to the doctor. It wouldn’t have made any difference; there is nothing Nurse Floria (Leonie Benesch) could have done to prevent a pulmonary embolism. But the nurse flinches. It’s true. There are just two of them on the late shift and a full ward of 26 patients: Even in Switzerland, which has arguably the best health service in the world, there are serious staff shortages. The dead woman was designated last on her round. Floria failed her.
Petra Volpe’s busy, urgent cancer-ward procedural is exactly what it says it is: a shift in the life of a nurse, a pile of incidents encountered at speed. Judith Kaufmann’s camera races behind and around Floria, looking intermittently rough: what doesn’t look rough in these circumstances? There are singular moments, such as Floria’s shouting argument with a private patient who keeps summoning her to complain about his tea. One patient, unable to spend one more night waiting for his diagnosis, absconds to go home to his dog.
These are unique events, each one a drama in itself, but they are unremarkable in the sense that there will be another set of unique events the next night. Equally, there are singular moments of quiet intimacy: Floria may never need to sing a lullaby to a fretful old lady with dementia again, she’s there for that too, channelling the tenderness of the daughter who is not there. Mr. Leu, the runaway patient, leaves a note to tell her she is angel. She pins it inside her locker, a counterweight to other patients’ grizzles and accusations.
Anyone who has seen Leonie Benesch at work knows she is one of best actresses now working. Exceptional in the 2023 German film The Teachers’ Lounge, Ilker Çatak’s breakout drama about school thefts and discipline, she can currently be seen in theaters as the still moral centre of Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5, playing the translator for the ABC journalists at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Here, she is simply marvelous.
Benesch worked as an intern in a Swiss hospital as preparation for the role, meeting the dedication of the nurses with her own committed approach. More than simply copying whatever she saw, she seems to have inhaled nursing as a new identity that is both precisely observed and emotionally complex. Her hands are quick, almost birdlike, as she gives shots and heaves patients on to gurneys, but her walk is as sturdy and vigorous as a field-worker’s, adapted to walking for eight hours straight.
At the same time, she carries the full weight of the strain that comes with having to to get everything right while also being kind. Floria’s firm, professional voice wavers only once, when she bawls out the private patient, but there are tiny cracks in her armor of efficiency, suggested by momentary glances or a break in her stride, that afford glimpses of the thinking, feeling woman inside it.
Her duties are endless. Give some children, whose young mother is dying, lollipops to keep them occupied while their father holds his wife. Confiscate cigarettes from the woman who insists on smoking on the balcony. Find some reading glasses, pursued by the daughter of an aged patient, left behind in a bedside table. Ring her own daughter to ask how her day has been and promise some together time. She even musters some school French to comfort a Gastarbeiter from Burkina Faso, a big man frightened because he is alone in Switzerland.
And through it all, sustained by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s discreet but telling score, there is a sense of imminent danger. One wrong injection, one wrongly dispensed IV drip, could kill a patient and end Floria’s career. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but sometime when she lets her guard slip. Volpe’s script, edited to a pumping pace by Hansjorg Weissbrich, never allows for a moment’s dull downtime; Late Shift moves like a thriller.
It even looks like one. Institutional architecture and steel-frame beds are difficult to make visually stimulating, but Kaufman’s camera zeroes in on pools of light by those beds, anxious faces and complexities of corridors, with Beatrice Schulz’s production design making the most of whatever contrasting spaces there are: the brightly lit morgue, the overgrown hospital garden, the spacious, luxuriously appointed private room where, as Floria will discover, her most annoying patient is pretending to everyone that he’s on a business trip, speaking from a hotel. Even his wife doesn’t know he’s in hospital, close to dying. Now we understand, as Floria undoubtedly already knew, why he’s a monster. He’s terrified.
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