Late Shift Review
Leonie Benesch, who broke out as the young woman manipulated into murder by a Nazi in global hit TV show Babylon Berlin, and later excelled as a teacher who makes a terrible mistake in the Oscar-nominated The Teacher’s Lounge, thrives when portraying women in stressful situations.
Her latest is Floria Lind, who works as an ER nurse in a large, perennially understaffed Swiss hospital. Late Shift – written and directed by Petra Biondina Volpe – follows Floria through one tumultuous night shift, as she juggles ailing patients and their anxious relatives, trying to keep everyone as healthy and happy as she can, while a teetering pile of crises threaten to come crashing down on all of them.
As we very soon find out, it’s an impossible task. Floria can’t spend as much time with any of her patients as she’d like to, because that’s time someone else isn’t getting. Everyone on the ward is sick, and vulnerable, and scared. When you are at a low ebb, it’s hard to comprehend that someone else is even lower – as a species, we are stuck with a terminal case of Main Character Syndrome. When a woman dies on the ward, her sons are furious with Floria, who hadn’t had a chance to get to that particular patient yet. Floria feels guilty, but it’s not as if she was sitting around doing nothing in the interim. Stalking her through those long, cold corridors, as we have been throughout the movie, we’ve seen first-hand how there’s barely been a moment where she’s not had three people to attend to at once.
Although, by its very nature, Late Shift is all pitched at a very high emotional key, the film has an abundance of empathy for those who have found themselves on Floria’s ward. Even the private patient, who has the gall to fume at her when she is late to get him the peppermint tea he requested, (“What’s private insurance for if you still get treated like garbage?”), is afforded redemption.
Arguably, Volpe’s generosity towards her characters goes a little too far sometimes, with her determination to tie up every loose end slightly undercutting the film’s otherwise admirable naturalism. Certainly the song that plays over the closing credits, ANOHNI’s ‘Hope There’s Someone’ (opening lyrics: “Hope there’s someone who’ll take care of me when I die”) is an egregiously on-the-nose choice.
At the end of Late Shift, we see a title card talking about the global shortage of nurses, which reframes all we have seen has something of a recruitment video. While well-intentioned, it strikes as a bit of an odd choice, it being hard to believe anyone would watch the onslaught that faced Floria over one shift and think, “Wow, that sure is something I’d like to experience every single day!”
And yet, when a film is as engaging, and made from such a clearly good place, it’s hard to be too persnickety about the moments that are a bit too blunt, or too neat, or slightly misjudged. As testament to the exhausting, incredible work that nurses do all over the world, for far too little recompense, Late Shift is a home run.
★★★★
