Night Nurse is a psychosexual thriller that finds plenty of ways to unnerve you
You don’t see a lot of movies like Night Nurse anymore. It’s basically the spiritual successor to all of those erotic thrillers that used to come on Cinemax at like three in the morning back in the day. It’s kind of a horror movie, but not really. It’s kind of softcore, but not really. And naturally, it’s kind of entertaining, but not really.
The first major surprise in Night Nurse is its director. You might assume a movie about scheming, conniving lesbian nurses and boomer con artists who may or may not be faking dementia would be the domain of male gaze schlock merchants a’la Jim Wynorski, but no, the filmmaker behind this one is Georgia Bernstein — a female director who also wrote its script. That might lead you to believe there’s some sort of female empowerment message within the film, but Night Nurse is a neo-bottom-rung-of-the-new-release-section-at-Blockbuster-thriller that’s gloriously devoid of anything you might consider political. It’s a film so locked into the ‘90s that I don’t even recall seeing a single smart phone at any point in the picture. Come to think of it, this movie may feature more landline phones in it than any movie this century. And amazingly, it’s not even a period piece. I think?
Thrillers like this one are all about the twists, turns, double-crosses and triple-crosses, so saying much of anything about the plot kinda’ spoils the whole thing for you. But the mostly spoiler-free gist of it is this; Cemre Paksoy plays our central character, the titular Night Nurse. As soon as she shows up on the screen — with a bug-eyed expression on her face that immediately reminded me of Angela at the end of the very first Sleepaway Camp movie — you know SOMETHING isn’t 100 percent right with her. Of course, that early on into the film you can’t quite put your finger on it, but you’ll figure it out in due time.
The other central character of the film is played by Bruce McKenzie. He’s an old dude in a nursing home that apparently has some money, except he might have early stage Alzheimer’s, or he might be pretending to have early stage Alzheimer’s, and he might be implicit in a series of phone scams targeting other geriatric residents, or he might be the one being manipulated by Paksov and her gal pal and fellow nurse (played by Eleanore Hendricks.) The film never makes it obvious what’s really going on, and for all we know, every single damn character in the movie is a lying manipulator ripping off everybody else in the movie. Sure, it might sound cynical and a bit nihilistic … and yeah, I guess it is.
Night Nurse, if absolutely nothing else, certainly succeeds at making you feel uncomfortable. As soon as we’re introduced to the retirement villa — where nurses engage in some unexpectedly intimate water aerobics exercises with their patients — we get the sense that something very abnormal is going on. It’s revealed a bit later on that the patients at the nursing home are all relatively wealthy, and they might be the ones who are taking advantage of the nurses in a series of increasingly bizarre trysts that straddle the line between sexually aberrant and just plain aberrant. If you like BDSM and second hand cigarette smoke inhalation, you are probably going to love this movie.
It’s a movie that’s very reminiscent of something like Wild Things or Sex, Lies and Videotape. I guess you could say the movie revolves around a love triangle, except there’s not much love and I don’t think the actual geometric shape that applies is a triangle. You don’t know who’s a user and who’s being used, or if they’re just pretending to be a user, or just pretending to be used, or who knows, maybe they really are into cuddle parties with chain-smoking senior citizens. There’s one scene where two characters start open mouth kissing (among other things) in a kitchenette area and it’s like watching two squirrels wrestle over an acorn. This movie is a lot of things, but “sexy” isn’t one of them.
Maybe the director was trying to make the world’s first anti-erotic thriller — a movie that takes all of the sexual out of psychosexual dramas. By now, we all know that a movie like this has to end with somebody getting snuffed out, and without giving away too many key details let’s just say the grand finale is like, a quadruple twist ending. I mean, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I guess that’s the point. As long as you’re thrown off track, that’s the important part.
I didn’t love Night Nurse, but I didn’t hate it, either. It’s a film that calls to mind a very specific type of movie that’s all but gone extinct as a mainstream attraction. You’re not going to see too many hard-R thrillers about telephone scams targeting the elderly and freaky Medicare sex, and in those two regards, you can’t say Night Nurse disappoints. It’s a movie that finds a way to make you feel very uncomfortable in a fairly uncommon way. We’ve seen a billion decapitations and dismemberments at the multiple by now, but when was the last time you saw a 70-year-old guy and a 20-something nurse swap spit like they were sharing the same piece of beef jerky? Exactly, y’all.
I can’t celebrate Night Nurse too much, but I can at least celebrate for doing something kinda different and unfashionable. It’s the epitome of an audience-alienating premise, to the point I envision most viewers tuning in simply because of the morbid curiosity of it all. It may not be a great film, but it’s pretty great at being disturbing in a manner very few films are these days. You may not like it, but you can still respect it for pushing the boundaries of good taste … and pretty damn far, at that.
GIVE IT A WATCH IF YOU LIKE: Shannon Tweed movies, that old Bruce Willis vehicle Color of Night, gerontophilia
DIRECTOR: Georgia Bernstein
WRITER: Georgia Bernstein
STARRING: Cemre Paksoy, Bruce McKenzie, Eleonore Hendricks, Mimi Rodgers
STUDIO(s): Missing Link Productions, Gary Prairie Productions
DISTRIBUTOR: Independent Film Company
LANGUAGE: English
RUNTIME: 95 minutes
RELEASE DATE: July 10, 2026
