Featured Image Credit: Netflix/Sipa US/Alamy
Topics: Netflix, TV and Film
Aisha Nozari
Eddie Redmayne’s latest role has sparked serious Oscar buzz, and we’d highly recommend checking out the film, but be warned: you’re gonna need a strong stomach. Check out the trailer below:
Redmayne’s nail-biting turn as nurse Charles Cullen in Netflix’s The Good Nurse is based on harrowing true events.
Over his 16-year career, Cullen is thought to have murdered as many as 400 patients, but upon his 2003 arrest, only confessed to 40 killings.
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Cullen — who was sentenced to 11 life terms — injected fatal drugs into patients’ IV bags, and has admitted to poisoning up to five bags a week at one point.
When it broke, the story shocked the system that had allowed Cullen to continue his macabre work, as well as shocking a public who would have assumed that they and their relatives were safe in the care of health professionals.
Questions were asked after the fact, given that Cullen was allowed to continue working despite the mysterious circumstances in which some of his patients died.
Redmayne plays the titular ‘good nurse’ whilst Jessica Chastain plays Amy Loughren, a former co-worker who was ultimately instrumental in helping the authorities bring Cullen to justice.
The whole story – as well as being based on the truth – is also based on the 2013 book about Cullen’s crimes by journalist Charles Graeber, entitled The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder.
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Cullen was known to have had a ‘miserable’ childhood, with both his parents dying before he left high school.
Then, after joining the US Navy his behaviour became troublesome and he became known as a loner.
He was medically discharged after a suicide attempt in 1984, after which he trained to become a nurse.
For years, Cullen flitted around different hospitals, often working on cardiac and intensive care units where people can sometimes die suddenly and unexpectedly.
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It’s believed he started killing in 1988, when John W Yengo Sr. died of what was at the time described as a ‘rare allergic reaction’.
Despite being fired several times, Cullen continued to find work and continued to kill patients.
Reports put this down to ‘weak’ reporting systems because ‘employers frequently [refused] to pass on negative information, even about people they have fired, for fear of being sued for slander by the former employee.’
In the end, he ended up working with Loughren, who was contacted by detectives investigating a string of mysterious hospital deaths.
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Loughren, described in the book as ‘outspoken and honest’, tracked down Cullen’s records and eventually handed her findings to investigators.
However, the evidence didn’t stick at first, but Loughren was eventually able to get Cullen to say incriminating things while wearing a wire.