‘Night Nurse’ is an Uneven, Lynchian Homage [Sundance 2026 Review]
Debut director Georgia Bernstein’s Night Nurse has been hailed as Lynchian by several outlets, and in a broad sense, I get it. The late Lynch’s style and rhythm can be hard to pin down and define—it’s like pornography that way—though it’s as easy a go-to as any for filmmaking that flirts with a distorted sense of reality and perversion. Night Nurse has the technicalities of a nightmarish, Lynchian fever dream, though Bernstein’s strong visual impulses are constrained by a script that never quite finds a transgressive pulse of its own.
Eleni (Cemre Paksoy) begins her first day as a night nurse at an ostensibly idyllic and remote retirement community. She’s assigned to Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), a virile retiree who smokes and swaggers like he’s in his early 20s. I get it. Eleni does, too, as does Mona (Eleonore Hendricks), Douglas’ daytime nurse. The trio grow close, and Eleni is soon roped into a long-running game Mona and Douglas have been playing for quite some time.
For some, there will be transgression in the psychosexual chemistry between the three. They flirt and seduce one another, and their sex is notably criminal. Literally, actually, inasmuch as their foreplay involves scam calls to the elderly, in which the women pose as incarcerated grandchildren, and Douglas as the attorney who needs the caller to relinquish bail money. The con permits them to lap it up in luxury, expanding their operation, their assortment of nurses, and their sense of unbridled freedom in a facility earmarked for death. They speed around in expensive cars, legs dangling out the window, cigarettes in mouth, warped into believing they’re in total control.
There’s atmosphere aplenty, and the performances are sufficiently off-balance, close enough to reality without tilting the scales too far toward verisimilitude. Mimi Rogers’ brief role as the facility’s administrator is the closest Night Nurse comes to feeling real, if only on account of recognition, though surrealism and a peripheral darkness do not a movie make. Night Nurse ambles when it should run, and its deliberately dense and austere approach to characterization dulls the in-between. Without the pop of sex, there’s just not a lot left to engage with.
Lynch’s thrillers worked not just because of his singular vision, but because of the pairing of humanity with the uncanny. Think the early hours of Lost Highway or the genuine love story at the center of Wild at Heart. Even Twin Peaks, perhaps his most enduring work, is as human as it is odd. At its best, Night Nurse pays endearing homage to a master. At its worst, it mistakes apathy for surrealism.
The uneven liminality culminates in the apex of madness and obsession, and the tables are flipped with regard to who yields the greatest sexual and, ultimately, violent control. There’s promise all around, and Bernstein’s keen eye for atmosphere and staging is too accomplished to dismiss outright. The script, however, reads a lot like an ear I found back in 1986, though with a lot less intrigue and propulsion.
I have no doubt Bernstein’s debut will catch some eyes, and it will do so deservedly. Night Nurse isn’t devoid of merit, even if—like so many debuts—its adherence to the past proves a detriment to its contemporary capacity to say anything of note. There’s something about nurses getting it on with their patients that piques curiosity, poses questions of power and subservience. Night Nurse isn’t often interested in the many reversals of powers as much as it is teasing the audience with the scintillating sight of a young woman mounting a man many decades her senior. It’d make my grandmother blush, but I’ve seen it too often before.
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Night Nurse
Summary
Georgia Bernstein’s Night Nurse is an atmospheric homage to David Lynch let down by an uneven script and indifference toward its main players.
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