The Good Nurse

The Good Nurse stars Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne and tells the story of serial killer Charles Cullen, who murdered of dozens of patients under his ...

“But...I was able to see how charismatic he was and how easy it was to be drawn in. In one instance he left a job over misconduct allegations when an elderly woman complained that he was not the nurse assigned to her but was continually entering her room to give her injections. The autopsy revealed a lethal level of digoxin in his system. In December 2003, Loughren asked Cullen to meet her at a restaurant and wore a wire. He enlisted in the the Navy shortly after. She was approached by detectives Tim Braun and Danny Baldwin, who were investigating the deaths of a few patients who had high levels of a drug called digoxin, which affects the heart, in their systems. The list was long, sometimes half a dozen in a night. Then, time and time again, Charlie ordered a restock from the pharmacy. After Cullen's arrest, he eventually confessed to 40 murders in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. She and Cullen were actually fairly close, working many night shifts in the intensive care unit together, which can be a bonding experience. How much of what is portrayed in the film really happened? Based on a true crime book of the same name by journalist Charles Graeber, the drama stars Eddie Redmayne as Cullen and Jessica Chastain as his co-worker Amy Loughren, who wore a wire to gain evidence that took Cullen down.

Krysty Wilson-Cairns, who wrote the new thriller, on the real-life events that inspired it.

We were walking out, and I said, ‘This is hard,’ and she was like, ‘This isn’t even the hardest things I’ve done this week.’ I said, ‘Well, you did catch a serial killer that one time,’ and she told me, ‘That’s not even the hardest thing I did. “Because you're hamstrung by what actually happened, that makes you have to be more inventive, more creative, and it makes you have to really double down into the essential,” the screenwriter says. “When we were about to go on stage at the Toronto International Film Festival, Amy and I were a bit nervous; it was the first time an audience had watched the film. “She was the person who used her humanity to awaken his,” she says. In The Good Nurse, Redmayne takes a chilling turn as Cullen, while Chastain plays Amy Loughren, another hospital nurse who befriends Cullen before realizing that something is terribly wrong and sets out to stop it. The Good Nurse, the new drama streaming now on Netflix, has all the makings of a classic thriller: There’s a seemingly unstoppable villain, a heroine forced to display incredible bravery, and stakes as high as they can possibly be.