Name: Night Nurse
Director: Georgia Bernstein
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Released: 2026-07-10T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 95 min
Cast: Cemre Paksoy, Bruce McKenzie, Eléonore Hendricks, Colleen Rose Trundy, Mimi Rogers

A luxury retirement community keeps its surfaces immaculate: soft carpet, warm lamps, the hush of managed comfort. Underneath, a run of scam calls is quietly working the residents, and a new nurse cannot name the pull she feels toward it. That is the frame of Night Nurse, the feature written and directed by Georgia Bernstein, where menace arrives as texture long before it arrives as event.

Eleni, the nurse, comes to care and stays to be drawn in. The scam calls that unsettle the community drive the plot, but the film’s real subject is proximity, and how attention at a bedside curdles into appetite until devotion and delusion begin to share a face. Bernstein films the space like a sedative. Pale walls. Low light. The camera holds a beat longer than comfort allows, and the dread is decorative long before anyone raises a voice.

Cemre Paksoy carries the film as a watcher rather than a mover, her stillness the mechanism the story turns on, a caregiver whose composure doubles as a hiding place. Bruce McKenzie plays Douglas, the elusive patient she circles, an intimacy the film refuses to resolve into either romance or exploitation. Mimi Rogers, as Doctor Mann, supplies the institutional calm that reads as its own quiet threat. The casting is the argument. Put restraint at the center and let the audience supply the alarm, and the film never has to announce what it is doing.

The craft is where the unease lives. A landline handset recurs like an instrument, pressed to an ear, cradled against a cheek, its coiled cord a small snare in the corner of the frame, and the sound design lets the ring and the dial tone carry more threat than any score would. Bernstein and her cinematographer keep the palette narcotic, a wash of beige and hospital green under lamps that never quite reach the corners of a room. Bodies are framed close and held still. The film treats a made bed, a medication cart, a plastic pitcher of water as objects with weight, and that patience, more than any single event, is what tightens the grip.

This is Bernstein’s first feature, and she wrote and produced it as well, a debut with a single controlling sensibility rather than a committee’s. Her interest is plainly in atmosphere over incident, in what a room and a held frame can imply about who holds power over whom. Shot in Chicago, the film belongs to the recent wave of American thrillers that locate horror in caretaking and class, less concerned with what happens than with what a well-run institution is quietly willing to permit. It sits closer to the slow-burn character study than to the jump-scare, a psychosexual thriller that would rather implicate the viewer than startle one, and it asks for patience the way its nurse asks for trust.

The scam-call scheme gives the film its social texture, a predation dressed as service, with elderly residents worked over by voices they have been taught to trust. Eleni’s own entanglement mirrors it. The argument Bernstein builds is that care and exploitation run on the same grammar of access, attention, and the license to touch. Night Nurse keeps the two so close that separating them becomes the viewer’s problem rather than the movie’s, and the erotic charge it generates is inseparable from that discomfort.

What the film withholds is also what will divide audiences. Motive stays vague. Whether Eleni is victim, accomplice, or the author of her own pull is never settled, and some will read the ambiguity as evasion rather than design. The psychosexual register, handled at this temperature, risks aestheticizing the exploitation of vulnerable people without fully reckoning with its cost. The film is more comfortable implying a moral bill than paying one, and it leaves the retirement-home scam it dramatizes curiously unexamined as a crime with actual victims.

Cemre Paksoy as nurse Eleni beside her elderly patient in Night Nurse (2026) — Cemre Paksoy in *Night Nurse* (2026)

Bernstein fills the community around Paksoy and McKenzie with faces that trade on ordinariness. Eléonore Hendricks and Colleen Rose Trundy sit among the credited principals alongside Rogers, and the supporting ensemble of residents lends the film an everyday texture that sharpens its unease, the sense that nothing here looks wrong. Missing Link Productions and Gary Prairie Productions produced. The thriller runs 95 minutes and carries a 76 percent critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes across its early reviews, a warmer reception than its cold surfaces might predict.

Night Nurse premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where its controlled, clinical register made it a talking point among the program’s genre entries. Independent Film Company has since acquired United States and Canadian distribution rights and set the theatrical release for July 10. On the evidence of its surfaces, the beige rooms, the ringing phone, the patient held a little too long in frame, Bernstein has made a first feature that trusts mood to do the work most thrillers hand to plot.