Director: Petra Biondina Volpe
Stars: Leonie Benesch, Selma Jamal Aldin, Jürg Plüss
I can’t speak for Switzerland, but here in the UK the state health service is in dire straits, victim of a long, slow strangulation by bipartisan special interests. Private care is encroaching onto these territories as the intended desperation takes hold, and the scarcity of both staff and resources is being felt keenly. Petra Biondina Volpe’s laser-focused Late Shift suggests a similar set of circumstances are playing out on the continent. She makes her point time and again over the course of the film’s tight 91 minute running time, depicting an abridged version of one nurse’s 8 hour turn on an ordinary hospital ward on an ordinary day.
The very beginning of the picture sees a mechanised laundry cleaning identical uniforms, pressing them together. The nurse is often perceived like this; an anonymous entity sandwiched in the workings of a greater machine. Late Shift challenges that anonymity.
Floria Lind (Leonie Benesch) arrives on the third floor ward to discover they’re short-staffed. Just the two of them to cover 25-or-so beds. What’s more she has an inexperienced intern, Amelie (Selma Jamal Aldin), to corral. Without a moment to pause she’s called upon for assistance, and so it goes. Late Shift itemises a steadily escalating sense of the decision making undertaken by a nurse in the course their day-to-day; what to prioritise, what to delegate, and how much time to give up to each patient. Everyone has a different idea of what constitutes an emergency, and the trivial is often just as demanding as the urgent.
Sitting in on Floria’s handover brief at the top of the picture gives us a rundown of the patients in her care. Hers is a general ward, with patients being ferried to and from surgery and many more in recovery, or waiting on a prognosis. We’ll meet all but one of them. And while the level of care and handling required by Floria for each patient varies, Volpe is careful not to get too didactic in her separation of the meekly compliant and the entitled troublemakers. Indeed, we’re sometimes encouraged to make swift judgments – as Floria is – only for Late Shift to reveal something more happening under the surface.
Some of the most riveting drama can be drawn from watching someone apply themselves to a task with diligence and professionalism. Strangely, while sitting with Late Shift, I was reminded of so many examples (often involving Jonathan Banks’ Mike) from the TV series Better Call Saul, where the storytellers would trust that a character’s dedication to their actions would translate to the audience. So it goes here. We’ll sit passively as Floria arranges medicines, finds veins, or – most striking and touchingly – decides who to sit with, to share her attention and to sooth. It’s a good hour into the picture before circumstances shade in a little of her life outside of the hospital, but we’ve gotten a good sense of her long before.
Benesch’s work in the lead is exemplary, not only for her evident study and immersion in the myriad technical procedures expected of a duty nurse. Through Floria we understand what’s a toll and what’s not. The movie’s tension levels play out across her face, behind the eyes, across her forehead, and in the tone of her voice as she tries to maintain – with earnestness – a standard that the circumstances aren’t allowing.
Volpe’s decisions are often dead-on, and in service of communicating this feeling of mundane pressure. Mercifully she resists the urge to make this a sprawling series of elaborate long takes. Cuts are sensible, seamless. Likewise, the score is used sparingly. Volpe shows restraint, for the most part. This isn’t the lurid bloody drama of Grey’s Anatomy or ER. The dialled-back stakes make it all-the-more real. A fatigued patient waiting for a consultation with a busy surgeon can be just as dramatic as the flurry of activity around a trauma victim; it just happens at a different register.
With so much detail and realism, dramatic license tends to announce itself, and so it goes when the frustrations of the day finally take their toll on Floria. An exchange with a particularly demanding patient over a watch is entertaining to say the least, but also feels like the contrived apex point that it is. Still, Volpe and Benesch are able to use it to steer us over the emotional finish line.
A gloomy set of on-screen text at the end of the picture predicts a global shortage of nurses into the millions by 2030, but the words are almost redundant. Late Shift has shown us it’s point thoroughly and empathetically.
Maybe clapping our hands and banging pots and pans at 8pm on a Thursday during COVID wasn’t enough.
The Lost Highway Hotel 