Featured Image Credit: Netflix
Topics: TV and Film, Netflix, Celebrity, True Crime
Jen Thomas
Fans are bracing themselves for a horrific new film, The Good Nurse, that features a very bad nurse indeed.
Starring Oscar-winners Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne, the film is heading to Netflix in October and is based on a book by Charles Graeber.
With true crime growing ever more popular, viewers are wondering if The Good Nurse is a true story.
The film tells the story of Charles Cullen, played by Redmayne, a nurse turned serial killer. Cullen confessed to murdering up to 40 patients over his career, in horrifying circumstances.
Terrifyingly, it’s all true: the source material is Graeber’s book, called The Good Nurse: A True Story Of Medicine, Madness and Murder.
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The film is a dramatisation, but the facts are all there.
Chastain plays Amy Loughren, a co-worker of Cullen. As the authorities closed in as the body count climbed, Loughren set about trying to catch Cullen in the act.
His spree took place over the course of 16 years, and took place cross several New Jersey and Pennsylvania hospitals.
In real life, police credited Loughren as the informant who solved the case.
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She spent time tracking Cullen’s drug requests, monitoring his computer entries, and she even wore a wire.
The trailer has already got fans talking, asking what they would do if they thought their real-life friend and colleague was a serial killer, and how could they protect further patients from his murderous intent.
In an interview, a former colleague of Cullen’s described him as private and impersonal: "It was like he was going through the motions, patting someone on the hand and telling them they'd be O.K.”
It was at his next job that he started murdering patients.
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His new role placed him on cardiac and intensive care units with very sick patients.
During his night shifts, with less supervision to watch over him, Cullen would administer lethal doses of digoxin to elderly patients.
The medication is used to treat heart conditions.
Due to the frailty of the patients, questions weren’t asked when they died.
His co-worker Loughren used a system at work to discover that Cullen was "researching" patients that weren’t his for hours, before the patient inevitably had some kind of medical episode.
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It was this revelation that led to his downfall.
The Good Nurse is coming to Netflix in October.