Night Nurse

It’s a gloriously deviant oddity, best suited to niche audiences drawn to atmosphere over plot, as Bernstein’s script achieves more as a woozy dreamspace than a neat crime story.

The strange world of Georgia Bernstein’s Night Nurse might not be on everyone’s wavelength, and the heightened aesthetic might be alienating. Still, the feeling of alienation is precisely what Bernstein excels at. Her feature debut shines for its uniquely mapped out story, and her distinctively hypnotic style leaves a reverberating impact long after the credits roll.

Directed by Georgia Bernstein, the perverse Night Nurse doesn’t quite qualify as a psychosexual thriller, despite underlying erotic tension; there is something more seductive and sinister under the surface.

Even so, when all is said, and the oddly amusing has turned dangerous, you may still be wondering what shaped Eleni’s desires? Night Nurse leaves that and other questions nudged, but not nailed down.

“Nurse at a retirement community gets her kinky kicks when she becomes part of a resident’s scam” is an accurate précis of the story of Night Nurse. Yet it comes nowhere near capturing how weird, idiosyncratic, hilarious, and unrelentingly horny the debut feature from writer/director Georgia Bernstein manages to be.

As moody and weightless as the noir-accented score that blows through the movie like a curlicue gust of wind in an old cartoon (credit to musicians Sam Clapp and Steven Jackson), Night Nurse lacks the pulse required for its stray feelings to come alive. Still, the film ambiently taps into the latent eroticism of teasing out the distance between how you see yourself and who you really are.

Attempting to wring tension out of unhurriedly parceled-out provocation, Night Nurse is a clumsy stab at metaphor that doesn’t quite connect.