‘The Good Nurse’ Director Tobias Lindholm on Exploring the Heroic Effort to Stop Serial Killer Charles Cullen
Brent Lang Executive Editor “The Good Nurse” director Tobias Lindholm wasn’t interested in making a why-dunnit. The Netflix drama, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, tells the horrifying true story of Charles Cullen, the serial killer who used his position as a nurse to murder up to 40 patients. But the film isn’t a psychological study. “I’m not that fascinated with the reasons that Charlie did this,” says Lindholm. “I was more interested in why we didn’t stop him sooner, because we could have.” Indeed, “The Good Nurse” is as much an indictment of the way that Cullen was able to maneuver through labyrinthine hospital systems, with executives and administrators covering his tracks as a way of skirting liability. That failure to fully acknowledge Cullen’s culpability in mysterious patient deaths, enabled him to go from one job to another, sowing destruction in his wake. Lindholm, who is Danish, says he wasn’t that aware of the particulars of the U.S. healthcare industry, but having overseen the political drama “Borgen,” he was very familiar with the way bureaucracies can lose touch with the people they are supposed to help.