‹ Back

(Review) NIGHT NURSE: Georgia Bernstein's Kinky, Confident Debut Turns Phone Scams Into an Erotic Thriller

By. Professor Horror

I missed NIGHT NURSE when it premiered at Sundance in the NEXT section back in January, so when the Music Box Theatre in Chicago announced an advance screening ahead of its July 10th release, I knew I had to attend. Part of my excitement came from the fact that Georgia Bernstein, the film's writer and director, is Chicago based, and her debut feature was shot right here in the city. Bernstein has said the idea came from something painfully close to home: her own grandmother nearly fell for a phone scam in which a caller impersonated her grandson, claimed he had been in a terrible accident, and convinced her to head to the bank before a teller intervened. That kernel of a real, ordinary, terrifying scam becomes the engine of a film that is anything but ordinary. NIGHT NURSE is a psychosexual thriller about a young caregiver, a manipulative resident at a luxury retirement community, and the elaborate telephone con that pulls them into a spiral of desire, control, and dependency. It is horny, it is disturbing, and it has absolutely no interest in giving you a safe word.

The opening moments set the tone before we even know who anyone is. We hear a voiceover of the now infamous scam script, the one where a caller poses as a panicked grandchild begging grandpa to send money right away because they are in trouble. But the visual track is doing something entirely different from the audio. The camera slowly, almost worshipfully, pans across a woman's bare skin in a single unbroken take while her breathy, pleading voice performs the con. An old fashioned coiled phone cord winds around her body throughout the shot, functioning less like a landline accessory and more like rope in a bondage scene, binding and framing her the way a shibari artist might. The extreme close-ups turn every inch of skin into something to be inspected, appraised, and desired. It is an interesting choice for an opening, essentially editing a phone scam and a scene of erotic submission into the same breath, and it tells you immediately that Bernstein is not interested in treating this material gently. The con and the kink are, from frame one, the same act.

From there we land in the retirement community itself, where the staff cannot seem to find a caregiver willing to put up with Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), a resident notorious for hitting on his nurses. Naturally, in the film's first bit of dark comedy, the solution the facility lands on is to assign him a young, slender, attractive night nurse named Eleni (Cemre Paksoy). The choice reads as almost comically bad judgment on the facility's part, and that is precisely the point Bernstein seems to be making about institutional blindness toward the sexuality of both the elderly and the people paid to care for them. As we spend time with the staff in these early scenes, the camera keeps finding the same intimate real estate on their bodies: the bare nape of a neck, the shadow of clevage, a row of shirt buttons caught in close-up. This is obviously sensual and erotic material, but it does not read as a typical male gaze so much as a gaze fixated on the specific vulnerability of caregiving itself. Night nursing for the elderly is supposed to be a selfless job, one defined by service and invisibility, and Bernstein's camera seems almost to perv on that selflessness, turning the very act of tending to someone else's body into something charged and transactional. It is a clever inversion: the uniform of care becomes a kind of costume, and the closer the camera gets, the more the labor of nursing starts to look like foreplay nobody asked for.

NIGHT NURSE isn't the only recent genre film interested in the complicated relationship between sex and human connection. Read our review of ANYTHING THAT MOVES, Alex Phillips's sex-positive Chicago thriller that treats intimacy, desire, and sex work with surprising warmth while navigating the city's criminal underworld.

Eleni's early attempts to evaluate Douglas only deepen the unease. She runs him through the standard cognitive tests, and he fails every single one of them, always with the same unbothered smile. Whether that failure comes from genuine memory loss or calculated dishonesty is impossible to determine, and the film is in no hurry to clarify. Douglas chain smokes, grins, and gives almost nothing of himself away, which makes him maddeningly hard to read and, frustratingly, more magnetic for it. Then, as the day shift gives way to night, Douglas makes Eleni an offer: he wants to take care of her. It is a line that should register as inappropriate, even predatory, coming from a resident to his nurse, and yet Eleni visibly considers it rather than recoiling. Bernstein structures these early scenes almost entirely around eyeline matches, so that we experience each character studying the other through a string of charged glances without ever seeing them occupy the same space and interact directly. The two remain suspended in parallel, watching but not touching, until the moment they start making the calls together, and only then does the film let them collide.

A lot of the buzz coming out of Sundance centered on how uncomfortable audiences found NIGHT NURSE, and I think that discomfort has less to do with the scam plot and everything to do with how rarely mainstream cinema lets elderly characters be sexual, particularly when there is a significant age gap involved. McKenzie brings decades of stage and screen work to Douglas, and part of what makes the discomfort land is that he plays the character's age not as a liability to be minimized but as a fact fully present in every scene. When Douglas eventually reveals the full scope of his scheme, that he has been running an elaborate phone racket that preys on other elderly men, the reveal plays less like a plot twist and more like a seduction technique. He manipulates his victims over the phone with the same practiced charm he uses on Eleni, and the effect on her is startling: rather than recoiling from the manipulation, she seems drawn deeper in, turned on by the sheer command he exerts over every call. She becomes captivated by the silver fox vulture in her care, circling something wounded and finding herself unable to leave him.

Douglas himself never sheds his old man uniform. He is almost always in rumpled button up pajamas, unshaven, his thinning hair perpetually mussed, a cigarette never far from his hand. There is something of Roger Sterling from Mad Men in him, that same unbothered chain smoking and effortless schmoozing, the same sense that charm has become a full time occupation even after everything else about him has started to decay. Sexually, Douglas has genuinely little to offer Eleni, and the film does not pretend otherwise. But his body is not really what she wants. The scam itself, the rush of watching someone get reeled in over the phone, functions as her kink, the thing that actually gets her off. Douglas, for his part, seems driven by the money more than by desire. Between his love of the con and her love of the thrill it produces in her, the two of them build an erotic partnership that runs almost entirely on parallel appetites rather than mutual lust, which somehow makes it kinkier, not less.

Bernstein has talked about looking to David Cronenberg's Crash while making this film, and the comparison tracks immediately once you see how NIGHT NURSE eroticizes something we are not conditioned to find erotic, in this case elder fraud rather than car wrecks. Both films ask viewers to sit with arousal generated by material that should, by every social convention, repel us instead. There is also a Bonnie and Clyde quality running underneath the Douglas and Eleni dynamic, the sense of two people who become more dangerous, more reckless, and more turned on precisely because they are doing it together. Where Bonnie and Clyde had guns and getaway cars, Douglas and Eleni have landlines and a rotating cast of confused, frightened elderly marks, but the emotional architecture, the way criminality and intimacy feed each other until neither one can be separated from the other, feels genuinely similar.

NIGHT NURSE is not always a comfortable watch, and it does not want to be. It is a film that asks real questions about caretaking, dependency, and who gets permission to be desired, and it refuses to answer any of them neatly. The performances from Paksoy and McKenzie (Would!) carry material that could have collapsed into camp in less careful hands, and Bernstein's confidence behind the camera, especially for a debut feature, is the kind of thing that makes me want to watch whatever she does next. If you can tolerate a little discomfort in your erotic thrillers, and honestly, if you are reading Professor Horror, I assume you can, this one is worth seeking out.

NIGHT NURSE opens in theaters July 10th.

Trust is a dangerous currency in horror. If NIGHT NURSE explores the uneasy intersection of caregiving, desire, and manipulation, then Noam Kroll's TEACHER'S PET examines another institution built on trust, where a charismatic teacher transforms mentorship into psychological control.