Sundance 2026 Review: NIGHT NURSE, Promising Psychosexual Thriller Dissipates Into Abstraction

Filmmaker David Lynch (Lost Highway, Wild At Heart, Blue Velvet) may have left this mortal plane for the next, but his influence — not to mention his filmography — survives in the work of filmmakers who found a kindred spirit in Lynch and his singular, irreducible, unreproducible worldview. 

 

Georgia Bernstein’s debut feature-length film debut as a writer-director, Night Nurse, a psychosexually tinged neo-noir, doesn’t fall into “Lynchian” territory (blurred boundaries between the real and the unreal, the canny and the uncanny, dream logic escaping into the "real" world, among other characterizing features), but, at a minimum, it’s Lynchian-adjacent and, as such, will be of qualified interest for Lynch’s fans and filmgoers eager for original, novel filmmaking. 

 

Set in and around an upscale retirement community, Bernstein’s film centers on the titular character, Eleni (Bernstein’s longtime collaborator Cemre Paksoy), a newly hired night nurse, and Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), a retiree and resident of said upscale retirement community. Exchanging an ambigiously charged glance during Eleni’s interview with the facility’s director, Dr. Mann (Mimi Rogers), Eleni becomes immediately intrigued by the enigmatic Douglas, a silver-haired, bearded retiree supposedly suffering from dementia or a dementia-related illness. 

 

Even before we meet Eleni or Douglas, though, something’s amiss at this upscale retirement community: The opening credits reveal offscreen Douglas coaxing a woman dressed as a nurse through a carefully planned, practiced routine, her body wrapped by the snakelike cord of a 20th-century landline (phone). Initially, the routine resembles nothing more than kink-inflected cosplay between presumably consenting adults: The nurse calls another resident of the facility, claims she’s the resident’s long-lost granddaughter, in trouble with the law, and in desperate need of bail money. 

 

It’s a scam, a grift, a hustle, of course, meant to separate memory-impaired patients from their bank accounts, but for Douglas and his nurse, first Mona (Eleonore Hendricks), Douglas's current day nurse, and later Eleni, as she falls under his hynpotic spell, it’s also part of a subversive psychosexual game that not only blurs the clearly defined roles (and lines) between caregiver and patient: It obliterates them, subverting them, turning them on their heads. Power dynamics shift, and Douglas flips the script, becoming the dominant player who dictates Mona and Eleni’s actions, breaking, if not outright shattering, conventions along the way. This ultimately leads to a reckoning that leaves several lives upended, some permanently. 

 

Despite an irresistibly provocative premise, fascinating thematic complexity, and a modern-day update of old-school, 20th-century erotic thrillers, Night Nurse suffers from languid, almost funereal pacing, ambiguity that borders on abstraction, and a frustratingly opaque central character. Eleni enters the film with a scant, sketchy background (nursing experience, inexplicably fired from her last position) and leaves the film as an unknown, unknowable cipher. 

 

Eleni’s devolution from a night nurse intrigued by Douglas into a needy, borderline unstable submissive makes little psychological sense, all the more because of how little we know about Eleni and how much less we learn about her across Night Nurse’s 90-minute running time. In contrast, Douglas reveals himself as a scammer from the get-go, using his perceived status (i.e., dementia) to exploit the nurses who tend to him, the facility that gives him a home, and the other memory-care residents who become the object of his cash-extracting scams. He doesn’t so much evolve or devolve as a character, existing primarily as a catalyst for Eleni’s transformation (such as it is) into a dangerously obsessive submissive.

 

Ultimately, Night Nurse promises far more than it delivers narratively or thematically, but as a calling card for the talented Bernstein, it should be more than enough to make her next project a must-watch.