Night Nurse opens on a young woman in a nurse's uniform, telephone cord wound around her, running a scam call on an elderly mark while the camera pans slowly up her body. That's the whole movie announcing itself in one shot: caregiving as compulsion, tenderness laced with something closer to a con. Eleni takes a job in a luxury retirement community and gets pulled into a pattern of scam calls targeting the residents around her, a pull she can't quite name or resist. The deeper she gets, the closer she grows to Douglas, an elusive patient who seems to be running the whole operation from his armchair, until care and desire and delusion stop being separate things.
It's the feature debut of writer-director Georgia Bernstein, who shot the film in Chicago starting in September 2024 after several shorts and a series called Snugglr. Cemre Paksoy plays Eleni, and the two have been close since the first day of college, with Bernstein writing the role with Paksoy already in mind. Paksoy has talked about leaning on Catherine Breillat's films and Isabelle Huppert's performance in The Piano Teacher while building the character, chasing something closer to controlled discomfort than conventional seduction. Bruce McKenzie plays Douglas, Mimi Rogers plays Dr. Mann, and Eleonore Hendricks and Colleen Rose Trundy round out the small cast that mostly has to carry a movie built on two people slowly losing their grip on where care ends and something else begins.
The film premiered in the NEXT section at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival on January 26, part of what turned out to be the festival's last edition in Park City before the move to Boulder. Independent Film Company picked it up that May and gave it a limited theatrical release on July 10, 93 minutes, an R-rated psychosexual thriller that was never going to play wide. Critical reaction split roughly the way a film this deliberately uncomfortable usually splits: some reviewers found it a genuinely strange, atmosphere-first piece of work that earns its woozy tone, others felt the two central performances never got developed past the concept holding them up. It's currently sitting around 76 percent on the major review aggregators, which is about right for something this committed to making its audience squirm rather than settling into a clean genre shape.
What holds the whole thing together, for the people who get on its wavelength, is that Bernstein isn't interested in playing the elder-scam plot for straightforward outrage or the age-gap dynamic for straightforward shock. Both fold into the same queasy current, care work and manipulation running through the same wiring, which is much harder to sustain across ninety minutes than either one on its own.
