Night Nurse ★★½

On the surface, the premise of Georgia Bernstein‘s deceptive debut feature, premiering at Sundance’s experimental Next section, sounds as seductive as the tired and timeless trope at its center. The twisted tale about control, con games, and co-dependency is set in an alternate reality only slightly deviant from present-day US, and starts out with a phone call. Young Eleni (Cemre Paksoy) talks to her grandpa, telling him she’s in trouble and might have to go to jail. But her careless demeanor and playful toying with the phone cord hint that there is something handy about this call. It’s one of several the opaque protagonist will make in her titular profession, both for pleasure and profit.

The old-fashioned dial phone and her scantily clad posture, which make her look like a vintage pinup, are among the casual details revealing that the world the characters exist in is part psychosexual fantasy, part a subtly provocative parody of such. This unsteady equilibrium mirrors the shifting tension between the two main characters. A flashback reveals the source of Eleni’s semi-delinquent desire for seductive scam calls. Her new position working night shifts at a posh retirement residence brings the novice nurse under the spell of shifty senior patient Douglas (Bruce McKenzie). While he’s supposedly suffering from dementia, this soon turns out to be one of his semi-criminal schemes to ensure his lavish lifestyle at the posh retirement community. 

Assigned to care for him in turns with equally stricken day nurse Mona (Eleonore Hendricks), Eleni joins Douglas in his cons. This involves calling his infirm co-inhabitants and claiming to be their granddaughter in eager need of money. While the funds might come in handy, Bernstein’s eager observation and intrusive close-ups establish right away that both are more interested in erotic role play than financial revenue. Though Douglas is ostensibly in control, Eleni’s increasingly forceful demands that he enact that part subvert the power dynamic. Despite her obvious fascination with the kinky relationship between her twisted characters, the director-writer never takes it any further. As soon as Eleni and Douglas have found their kinky routine, the plot stalls. 

Stuck between lurid morality play and erotic exposé, the story never really goes anywhere. Neither of the characters possesses much depth, and their superficial appeal ultimately wears off. The perverted atmosphere lingering in the institution’s pale-lit corridors and the hints at a larger network of moral corruption remain superficial details. Formal allusions to the psychosexual melodramas of the 50s and 60s, fixated on ostensibly “good” women driven to illicit actions by subconscious impulses, remain vague gestures. Cinematographer Lidia Nikonova underlines the omnipresent ambivalence with dusky colors and muted light, lingering in latent unease. Slow zooms and reflective surfaces recall the heightened aesthetic of 1980s erotic thrillers, yet the mundane setting of a care facility undermines their genre conceits.

Elegance and decay form a curious coexistence that becomes yet another metaphor for the murky line between enabling and exploitation, mutuality and manipulation. More concerned with aesthetics and mood than narrative development, Bernstein’s distinctive debut never fulfills its promise to be truly subversive. Refined texture and heightened style can’t fully compensate for the slow pacing and obscure motivations. Potent performances help to ground a tale constantly on the verge of tilting over into absurdity. The intent to contrast the explicitness of conventional erotic films with a scenario purely relying on suggestion has an undeniable appeal, but the result remains so concerned with articulation that it forgets what it wants to say.