Summary
It tells a familiar true-crime story, but The Nurse is nonetheless a tight and well-constructed thriller fronted by two more-than-capable performances.
This review of the 2023 Netflix series The Nurse Season 1 does not contain spoilers.
If The Nurse has caught your attention on Netflix, you might be wondering, quite rightly, if you’ve seen it before. It’s based on a true story about a nurse who is deliberately killing patients and a colleague who notices — an eerily similar premise and title to that of The Good Nurse, also on Netflix.
But this Danish miniseries, adapted from the book of the same title by Kristian Corfixen and directed by Kasper Barfoed, who also directed the really good Netflix crime thriller The Chestnut Man, is a different case that happened in a different country, even if it does hit some of the same chillingly familiar beats.
The Nurse Season 1 review and plot summary
Plot-wise, our POV character is Pernille Kurzmann Larsen (Fanny Louise Bernth), a new nurse at Nykøbing Falster Hospital in Denmark. The posting is her first after her graduation, and she still has some of that idealism you imagine drives people who get into the medical profession in the first place. Most people, anyway.
Not, however, people like Christina Aistrup Hansen (Josephine Park), a superstar nurse beloved in the small town to such an extent that nobody seems to notice how many people die under her care.
The insularity of the community and the obviousness of the malpractice being overlooked prompts Pernille to begin her own investigation into what’s going on, and thus, across four episodes, we have our series.
Is The Nurse good or bad?
The Nurse is pretty good, all things considered, despite the familiarity of the story. It’s carried on the backs of Bernth and Park, naturally, but as mentioned above, Barfoed has a real knack for suspense-building, and more importantly getting to the point.
More shows, I think, should run for only four episodes. There’s no room here to pad the runtime with unnecessary subplots or nonsense. It’s a lean, dramatic recreation of events precisely engineered for all-in-one audience consumption.
Is The Nurse worth watching?
Mileage will obviously vary here given the miniseries’ similarities to The Good Nurse, and the true-crime genre is, of course, as overstuffed as ever with worthwhile offerings.
However, The Nurse is such a tight and solid version of a well-worn format that fans will gobble it up, and rightly so.
What did you think of the 2023 Netflix series The Nurse Season 1? Comment below.
