Late Shift

Night Shift does not go for full-on social realism. One wealthy patient comes across as something of a cliche. The details of Floria’s eventual meltdown would be more at home in a medical soap than in a film that, elsewhere, strives for rigorous representation of working practices. But Benesch carries us compellingly through those narrative convulsions to an ending that makes an epic of the everyday.

Many audiences may shy away from projects like “Late Shift” because its realism is too unsettling, but that’s exactly why it’s necessary in the first place.

The clever and effective Late Shift depicts nursing as a permanent emergency that finds its equivalent in a breathless, anxious rhythm designed to jangle the staunchest nerves. For audiences who are into job-horror with a stranglehold, it qualifies as one of the most engrossing films in the festival.

Occasionally schematic, albeit only in the service of pricking our consciences, Petra Volpe’s tense drama is a shot in the arm of undiluted empathy for the over-stretched, under-valued nursing profession.

Benesch brings a tough, smart, credible presence.

Late Shift is carried on Benesch’s shoulders, and she impresses. It’s just a shame she isn’t given more of a movie to act in.

For all its empathy, Late Shift upholds the dubious virtue of self-sacrifice that underpins the Protestant work ethic.