Considering her film The Teachers’ Lounge gained a best international feature film Oscar nomination, maybe Leonie Benesch should be better known. (As well as playing a teacher in that film, she was also the interpreter in the Munich Olympics drama-thriller September 5 and played Prince Philip’s sister Cecilie in Netflix’s The Crown.) Benesch could be cornering the market in tough, competent, hardworking young women doing their best in a stressful situation.
Here she plays Floria, a nurse (and a single mum) working the late shift in a gleamingly modern but evidently badly understaffed Swiss hospital. Floria has to hit the ground running from the very beginning of every working day. (The original German title is Heldin, or Heroine.) Writer-director Petra Volpe has adapted the autobiographical novel Our Profession Is Not the Problem. It’s the Circumstances, by German nurse turned author Madeline Calvelage. It’s shot using classically Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk lines, with Floria exchanging terse technical dialogue with colleagues in the corridors. And there’s almost a real-time single-take aesthetic, although there are conventional edits. British audiences would be within their rights to compare it to Casualty or Holby City.
Floria is compassionate and conscientious, but it is clear that the workload is almost intolerable. Over the closing credits, the film invokes World Health Organization findings that there is a global lack of nurses. Every conversation or encounter with a patient is pressured, and patients are either poignantly grateful or resentfully on the verge of complaining. To calm one old woman with dementia, Floria sings the German lullaby The Moon Has Risen, and the woman quaveringly joins in. It’s a touching moment, which briefly stills the movie’s frantic pace, but it makes Floria late for everything and everyone else.
The crisis arises with a pompous man who has paid for a private room and is furious because Floria is late bringing him his tea. Floria snaps, but the situation is resolved a little too easily. This is where the movie begins to look like a TV soap whose storylines have to be wrapped up within the hour (and the final montage with sad music ranging across all the patients verges on cliche). But Benesch brings a tough, smart, credible presence.
Late Shift is in UK and Irish cinemas from 1 August.