La captura del enfermero asesino

I read the Good Nurse five years ago and I consider it one of the best true crime books that I have ever read, and I have read well over three hundred of them.

Charles Cullen is the good nurse in question here. The lunatic worked at several hospitals and a nursing home, leaving a trail of death behind.

Finally, after fifteen years and a number of untimely and suspicious deaths, one courageous nurse voiced her feelings to a pair of tenacious detectives.

A Catholic priest was one of Chuckie's murder victims and after being exhumed, the good reverend had a high level of the heart medication Digoxin in his body.

The recordings of Cullen are riveting and I only wish that more of them had been used in the film.

I highly recommend both the book and the film.

The story is interesting. And it is imperative that people understand that we now have another "blue wall of silence" covering up corruption and illegal behavior by the institutions. We had the police blue wall of silence and now we have the medical one too. As it is true in the US as it is definitely true in the UK and that leads me to believe it is EVERYWHERE.

That being said this 1:30h documentary could've been done in 45min. I mean keeping all the info mentioned which some reviewers even complained the info wasn't enough. But this thing is soooooo slow, with several intervals of repetitive music, several empty scenes, and how they move the picture on a drawn timeline while slowing down on every date so u can read it and keeps going back 20 years. Every single time the timeline is shown it's done in the same manner. Going over every date of employment u think ok they're talking about this era. Nope keep waiting.

Even limited series documentaries aren't that slow. The only documentary I watched that was worse than this was the Dennis nilsen one where the whole thing is the view of a tape recorder and narration. Not even background scenes or photos or maps or anything. Extremely lazy. Like watching paint dry. Literally.

These directors and editors need to understand that stretching scenes to get the docu to last longer than hour is easily noticeable by the viewer and it puts ppl off and lowers the rating. But I think all that happens after they all get paid so who cares right? Smh.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but in the case of this documentary, it's an improvement. Serial killers have been a compelling subject for dramatization since Hitchcock's "Psycho," at least in American popular culture. But the fascination dates back to Jack the Ripper, and even farther back to the Middle Ages. This year it's Netflix's recent portrayal of the "good nurse" killer, a dismal excuse for biographical adaptation. It might have been worthwhile if it had offered new insight into horrible events, portrayed compelling emotions, or delved into human nature. The result could have been interesting, even entertaining, like a thriller. This documentary accomplishes all of this with no convoluted plot and contrived performances. The actual killer, Charles Cullen, is a far more chilling and impenetrable human being than the one portrayed by Eddie Redmayne. Cullen's matter-of-fact delivery as he explains the motivations that lead him to kill patients and his almost childlike self-possession are unnerving. Redmayne is a good actor, but his choice of intonation and nearly comatose performance failed to capture these real qualities. With straight-forward story telling and genuine emotion, this film imparts unimaginable horrors all the more frightening because they are so credible.

The killer nurse, Cullen, like Dr. Death, Duntsch, was enabled by a medical system more concerned with profit than upholding morality. Just as Duntsch did, Cullen was passed down from one hospital to another like a sexually transmitted disease to continue his appetite for killing patients. The two murderers were apprehended and convicted ten years apart, so it is apparent that the medical system did not learn their lesson.

The documentary could have delved more into Cullen's early life. Tape recordings of the man himself described a boy who was petrified by the loss of safety resulting from the death of his mother, his only protector. No clue was given as to what or whom he feared. But this terror became the seed out of which grew a sociopathic killer.

Cullen claimed that he could not bear witnessing the suffering of the patients and therefore killed them out of mercy. Yet these patients were on the mend and not terminally ill when he brought forward their demise. It was never about the patients and everything to do with his own inner anguish. He projected his suffering onto them and symbolically vanquished it by ending their lives.

I watched this having watched the film in which Eddie Redmayne started as Charles Cullen.

I'm glad I did it this way round, so many things I found hard to believe in the film, were actually true, the film wasn't sensationalised, it seemed to stick quite rigidly to the content.

What a documentary should be, thought provoking, dramatic, revealing, and a little bit shocking, some parts of it were actually hard to fathom, that is one messed up system.

Amy Loughren's thoughts were astonishing the whole way through, once again, I'm speechless at how rotten the establishment was, how many lives could have been saved.

One thing the film didn't really get into was Cullen's motivation, you will actually hear that in his own words here, the interview sequences were astonishing I thought. What a curious guy, I'd like to see more on him, to try and understand him a little better, he's impossible to piece together.

8/10.