How accurate is The Good Nurse?

The Good Nurse’s timeline of events were accurate, but it did take liberties in the finer details of the Charles Cullen true crime story.

Netflix recently has been in its true crime fictional retelling pocket. The platform recently released the polarising fictionalised and sensationalised retelling of the Jeffrey Dahmer story with Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.

Soon thereafter, it followed with the thriller true crime movie, The Good Nurse, which was made available on the streaming service on Thursday, 26 October 2022.

Following its arrival, the big question on a lot of people’s minds was how accurate the narrative is to the true real-life events on which The Good Nurse is based.

While the film stayed true to the sequence of events, the finer details were dramatised or rather tweaked for a number of reasons.

Why The Good Nurse is not like Dahmer

The Good Nurse tells the story of how serial killer Charles Cullen, played by Eddie Redmayne, used his position as a nurse to murder patients at the hospitals and nursing homes he worked at.

However, instead of sensationalising the narrative through a focus on Charles’ motives, the film, written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns, focused on the nurse that helped bring Charles to book.

As such, the film is told through Amy Loughren’s perspective, played by Jessica Chastain. Loughren was a nurse who worked with authorities to bring Charles to justice.

How accurate is The Good Nurse?

The Good Nurse is primarily based on the adaptation of the 2013 book written by Charles Graeber titled The Good Nurse: A Story of Medicine Madness and Murder.

However, it is reported that the film also used supplementary source material to create its narrative as it worked with the real-life Amy Loughren to finetune the details of the film.

In terms of the accuracy of the film, understanding its perspective is key. This is as the film did not focus on “humanising” or justifying the actions of Charles Cullen by telling the story from his perspective.

But instead, it told the story from friend and former colleague Amy Loughren’s point of view, as explained by director Tobias Lindholm when he said that the intention of the film was “never (to) offer any knowledge about Charlie that (Amy) doesn’t have”.

As such, The Good Nurse was accurate in the retelling of the events which eventually led to Charles Cullen’s arrest.

Therefore, the film stayed true to Charles’ professional history, though this is not to say that it did not take liberties in terms of the more minute details to create a compelling story, which was ultimately aimed at not justifying the actions of Charles.

But it seems that the film intended to highlight how Charles got away with what is estimated to be over 400 deaths, despite the fact that he was convicted for 29 deaths after confessing to 13.

It highlighted how hospitals feared retribution and backlash for firing Charlie when he did not resign, instead of actually investigating the suspicious deaths.

	Where to buy The Good Nurse: A Story of Medicine Madness and Murder by Charles Graeber

Were Charles Cullen and Amy Loughren friends?

Charles Cullen and Amy Loughren were friends, as suggested by the film. But in real life they were not as close as portrayed in the film as Charles visits Amy and her two young daughters at their home and helps one of them with learning their lines for a school play.

But they were friends, as Loughren explained to People, in the sense that he was “funny” and that they “bonded right away”.

Moreover, her mixed feelings about wearing the wire that resulted in his arrest was a true feeling, which she explained when stating, “I was wrestling with how much I still cared for him. He was my friend. I didn’t know the murderer”.

Were the murder cases real?

In The Good Nurse, some of the murder cases include a woman recovering from an allergic reaction who has just found true love that dies suddenly at 77, and a young mother who’s survived an accident that also dies unexpectedly.

The cases were reportedly fictionalised as the film did not want to retraumatize any of the families who may have lost loved ones to Charles. Therefore, these cases were not related to any known victims by the serial killer.

Was Charles Cullen’s motive real?

The film depicts Charles Cullen’s motives in a certain way. After discovering that his mother died at a hospital and was left naked and forgotten, he wanted to exact his revenge on the public health system.

But Cullen suggested differently when he spoke about his reasons. He claimed that the murders were out of mercy for his victims.

Moreover, he asserted that he would have not stopped his killing spree if he was not finally brought to book through Amy Loughren’s assistance by wearing a wire when he confessed his crimes.