‘The Good Nurse’ Includes a Few Key Changes to Charles Cullen’s Real-Life Murders
It is a great time to be alive for true crime enthusiasts. The streaming platforms have plenty of movies, mini-series, and documentaries coming out over the next few months. Among them is the Netflix movie The Good Nurse. Combine a nurse with a dark motive, and you have an interesting story.
‘The Good Nurse’ is actually about a good nurse
The Good Nurse depicts the story of Charles Cullen, an American nurse. It is believed that Cullen murdered his patients without any real motive for 16 years, according to the LA Times. He was arrested in 2003 and told two homicide detectives that he killed as many as 40 people.
Now, experts believe that number could be well into the hundreds. Cullen could possibly be the most prolific serial killer ever to be known. Charles Graeber thoroughly researched Cullen’s case and released his book, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder, in 2013.
The new Netflix film, The Good Nurse (2022), is based on Graeber’s book. It is written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns and directed by Tobias Lindholm. What sets The Good Nurse apart from other true crime movies is the perspective from which the story is told. Instead of focusing on Cullen, the movie focuses on Amy Loughren.
Loughren was a nurse friend in the same hospital as Cullen. She turned into a whistleblower and informant, according to NJ. She is the driver of the story as the real “good nurse.” About the movie, Loughren said:
“The Good Nurse focuses very much on the human condition, which is extremely flawed, extremely complicated, extremely layered … And it does not focus on murder. What it does focus on is the love that people had for their family members that were patients, the love that Amy had for her patients, for her patients’ loved ones, and how invested she was in fighting against a system that was set up not only to harm her, but harm other people.”
Here are four ways that The Good Nurse veered from the reality of the true case of Cullen.
Cullen used various methods of killing
The methods of killing used by Cullen in The Good Nurse are accurate. However, Cullen did use various methods to kill his victims over the years. Graeber wrote that Cullen had adapted his murder methods throughout his career, which was difficult to show in the film.
One of the methods Cullen used involved:
” … polluting IV bags before they went out on the floor, which is to say dosing them with dangerous medicines in the storeroom before they even went out to patients, that was one of his initial, admitted methods for overdosing patients. But it was by no means the only way he did it. And it wasn’t the way he was doing it at the end.”
The timeline was condensed to six months
Cullen was actively killing patients for 16 years. The Good Nurse, however, focuses on the six months right before his arrest.
In those six months, The Good Nurse tells the story of Loughren and how she is a single mom struggling to support two children all while battling a potentially deadly heart condition. She befriends Cullen in those final six months and starts suspecting he is poisoning his patients. She works with two homicide detectives to uncover the truth and is instrumental in Cullen’s confession.
Cullen would not spend time with Loughren’s children
Another way that the timeline is condensed in The Good Nurse is that it depicts Cullen becoming enmeshed in Loughren’s work life and home life. He befriends her two children, spends time at their house, and even becomes somewhat of a babysitter for them.
The reality is, according to Graeber, that while Cullen knew where Loughren lived, he never would have met her children.
The film victims are fictionalized
Cullen is depicted murdering several of his victims in the movie. However, out of respect for the victims and the victims’ families, all on-screen victims are fictionalized in The Good Nurse. Lindholm, the director, said:
“There is not a patient that is a true story … None of the deaths we see in the film are based on real victims. We took the liberty to change that because that basically wasn’t the point of the film, that you know exactly what happened. We did not want to retraumatize anybody.”
