In television, hospital shows are a dime a dozen. The rise of The Pitt, the unstoppable longevity of Grey’s Anatomy, and a number other hospital-centric shows reveal no shortage of fascination with medicine and trauma. It’s often rare in cinema unless its haunted wards or part of a protagonist’s character make up. This sets the stage for something like Late Shift to hit like a ton of bricks, grounding itself self in a tense, tightly framed reality of nursing and just how hard it is to stay sane under relentless pressure, chaos, and staff shortages. Pulled from real life nurse experiences, Late Shift is a deeply intense pressure cooker that uses its chamber piece setting to great effect and delivers an unexpected edge-of-your-seat thriller.
Written and directed by Petra Volpe, Late Shift follows Floria, a dedicated nurse in an understaffed hospital in Switzerland. As she clocks into her night shift, she is confronted with an ever escalating array of problems and demands across her many, many patients, each passing hour levels up the stress and pressure she faces to keep things in order. As she rushes from room to room, an inciting incident threatens to send an already stressful shift into complete chaos and just may see Floria crack and crumble under the weight of it all. Late Shift stars Leonie Benesch as Floria, a true lynchpin performance that is so electric and enthralling she singlehandedly carries the film on her shoulders.
Volpe decides to keep things as grounded as possible, rarely adding superfluous layers of medical drama and letting the actual work provide the conflicts as they arise. She stays close and tight on Benesch, evoking an Aaron Sorkin walk and talk style framework as characters rush through the hospital halls spouting technical jargon and recapping their growing laundry lists of tasks.
Benesch, no stranger to being the centerpiece of every frame from her previous work in The Teacher’s Lounge proves more than capable of executing a tricky balance of trying to stay in total control while watching every uncontrollable test her limits. She is a woman stretched too thin, driven be a desperation to do right by her patients and be a good nurse even when all the odds are stacked against her. You simply can’t take your eyes off Benesch. She commands every single scene with poise and a simmering intensity just below the surface of her forced calm, collected demeanor. In a less crowded year, it would be an Oscar-worthy performance. She’s THAT good.
Consistently Tense and an Excellent Lead Performance
The demands of healthcare workers is astronomically high, and demand for more of them has proven to be increasingly difficult. Late Shift explores these challenges and digs a little deeper into the burnout that high-pressure necessity jobs can lead people to. Volpe not only identifies all of this, but lets everything grow increasingly untenable in a restrained yet relentless pace. Late Shift doesn’t need made up love stories or some world-ending event to keep you glued to the screen. Sometimes reality is harder to deal with than fiction, and following Floria through those realities is all the struggle you need. There is such a tenderness and underlying humanity injected into its story, never losing sight of the fact that everyone – patient and staff alike – are human beings just trying to make it to tomorrow.
At times, Late Shift feels more like a documentary instead of a fictionalized thriller. This is normally a defect, but with Volpe’s craft and Benesch’s incredible performance it becomes a core tenant of its effectiveness. Its compassionate lens may drift into sentimentality sometimes and everything does wrap up a little too neatly, but the need for love and hope and humanity has never been greater and I’d argue that both compassion and sentiment are exactly what we need more of – now more than ever.
Late Shift moves at a brisk, almost unrelenting pace and puts you right in the middle of hospital corridor chaos. The temperature slowly turns from simmer to boil and before you realize it, you’ve becoming wholly invested and gripped by its arresting lead performance and unstoppable pressure. The message is clear: we need more nurses and we need to treat our healthcare workers better. It may sound obvious, but Late Shift is a strong reminder that those simple realities have been sadly forgotten and most certainly overlooked.
I was truly blown away by Late Shift, and found it to be deeply resonate and possibly one of the best films of year. I also have a number of healthcare workers in my family, so something like this was sure to have a profound impact on me. Don’t skip this one, folks.
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