Night Nurse was one of the most pleasantly unhinged surprises I caught at Sundance. The last thing I expected walking in was an erotic thriller slithering through the darker, more taboo corners of caregiving—but that’s exactly what Georgia Bernstein delivers. Written and directed with wicked confidence, the film follows Eleni (Cemre Paksoy), a young nurse assigned to overnight care for Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), a charming, silver-tongued older man who—despite claims of dementia—seems far more lucid than advertised. As Eleni slips deeper into his orbit, she discovers Doug is bankrolling his outrageously expensive care by scamming fellow residents over the phone.
It’s weird. It’s horny. And it’s compulsively watchable.
At its core, Night Nurse is about power, need, and the kind of intimacy most movies are too squeamish to touch. Eleni needs to be needed, and Doug clocks that instantly, weaponizing her empathy as the two spiral into a toxic, mutually assured codependency. The age gap is jarring at first—intentionally so—but Bernstein smartly lets that discomfort curdle into something more complex. What unfolds isn’t sexual in any traditional sense, but it’s absolutely erotic: charged glances, whispered conversations, emotional manipulation masquerading as care. Think Crash set in a retirement home, somehow stripped of nudity yet dripping with tension.
What really sneaks up on you is how funny it is. Night Nurse skewers life in a retirement community with a vicious, off-color sense of humor, even as it wades into some bleak psychological territory. Bernstein balances that darkness with precision, allowing moments of genuine emotional impact to land without softening the film’s edge. This is horniness as pathology, intimacy as transaction—and it’s all the more intoxicating for it.
Night Nurse is exactly the kind of sweaty, smart, deeply uncomfortable erotic thriller that feels destined for cult status. It’s not just provocative—it’s pointed, funny, and disturbingly honest about the desires we pretend don’t exist. File this one under: “Netflix is going to make a lot of people extremely uncomfortable,” and honestly? Good.
