Leonie Benesch can’t catch a break. After being put through the wringer contending with the intense demands of the school system in the Academy Award-nominated The Teachers’ Lounge, the actor’s latest role finds her balancing another high-wire act in a claustrophobic institutional setting. Petra Volpe’s Late Shift, set during the overnight stint at an understaffed Swiss hospital, examines the impossible responsibilities of a nurse and her small crew. Capturing a stressful environment of constant interruptions that distract from medical urgencies, Switzerland’s Oscar-shortlisted procedural is a work of high intensity and acute resonance, even if it lacks a certain personality by design.
As writer and director, Volpe has fashioned a film that functions as a character study, though not one of the rather nondescript nurse Floria (Benesch), but of the greater system that forces its workers onto the front lines of life-or-death situations with little support. During each hurried visit, we pick up bits and pieces of the health issues and lives of Floria’s patients. Through Volpe’s microscopic viewpoint of one grueling shift, a macro curiosity emerges, questioning how many millions of other nurses across the world face similar difficulties. (This is answered in the film’s tidily summative, message-driven conclusion.) Setting action in Switzerland, a country regarded for its high standard of healthcare, Volpe seems to suggest that if these strains are felt in such a well-off place, one can only imagine the severity of conditions in hospitals less equipped.
As Floria enters the rooms of the two-dozen-plus patients in her surgical ward, new problems await: soiled pants, requests for more painkillers, patients berating her for the wrong kind of tea, and calls to see if glasses were left behind, alongside more life-threatening needs. Although each dilemma is unique, the connective tissue is that no patient is aware of the others’ demands, nor how critical those requests may be. Each need is delivered with the utmost urgency, and Floria must weather it all with a smiling face. With cinematographer Judith Kaufmann’s restless camera fixed on Floria’s every move and reaction, Benesch delivers an impressively fraught performance of internalized anxiety. As requests mount, the film becomes a guessing game of when she will snap. The breaking point comes, of course, in a bit of heightened drama that feels a touch overdramatic and heavy-handed in its class commentary.
Floria’s only aid comes from a fellow nurse and an inexperienced trainee. In these brief moments we see doctors, they lack both sensitivity and an understanding of the understaffed workload, revealing a systemic problem with a resolution lying much higher up the chain. With an episodic structure, the film’s messaging carries a single-minded bluntness, and Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s score tends to telegraph a bit too much emotion naturally provided by the drama.
Yet as a call to action for better working conditions and pay for nurses, its delivery is remarkably effective. With nail-biting intensity, Late Shift emanates empathy for those on the frontlines of the healthcare industry while convincingly putting the viewer in the shoes of those facing these life-or-death issues. Considering the lives in their hands, a nurse’s only moment of escape and solace shouldn’t be a brief elevator ride between floors.
Late Shift opens in theaters on Friday, March 20.