Shy, enigmatic Eleni (a revelatory Cemre Paksoy) doesn’t disclose much about herself. After not feeling “like myself for a while,” the lead of writer-director-producer Georgia Bernstein’s feature debut, Night Nurse, took some time off after leaving her last health care job — from which whispers of her firing, for possibly inappropriate misconduct, have arisen — and she says, when asked, that she doesn’t do anything “for fun” outside of work. To her, she politely offers, taking care of her patients is a good enough pastime.

Paired with the intensity of her stare, those two unsettling characteristics are all that’re needed of Eleni for the purposes of Night Nurse’s unnerving, eccentric narrative, which, relatedly, leaves you wanting more than you’ll get. Bernstein evocatively generates a dread-seeped, stifling atmosphere: Steven Jackson and Sam Clapp’s piano-forward score menacingly trembles with haunted-house creakiness, and the antiseptic ambience of the retirement community in which it’s nearly entirely set — lukewarm wade pools, assiduously selected houseplants, dutifully cleaned linens, neatly ironed uniforms — is persuasively recontextualized as a hotbed for secretiveness and scheming, a place where “attention at a bedside curdles into appetite until devotion and delusion begin to share a face,” Jun Satō recently wrote. But the personally inspired storyline buckles after the promise generated by the enthrallingly mysterious first act, when you’re still keenly trying to guess whether Night Nurse will become a perverse horror movie or a perverse — and unexpected, considering its stereotypically desexualized primary location — erotic thriller. 

It’ll prove to be a little bit of both, albeit neither very committally nor very convincingly. The unstable Eleni turns out to be susceptible to the mischievous twinkle in her new patient Douglas’ (Bruce McKenzie) piercingly blue eyes. He coaxes her into a sexual, though never consummated, relationship, his request to “let me take care of you” a cause for role-reversing arousal Eleni never seems to second-guess. Revealed to be a grifter, Douglas gets Eleni to participate in thus-far pretty lucrative (to the tune of a cumulative quarter-million dollars) phone scam where he teams up with a young woman — apparently the various nurses who’ve taken turns caring for him, under a seemingly false premise of dementia — to fleece 65-and-up widowers out of thousands by making them think their granddaughters have been in a terrible accident. 

Eleni becomes an eager partner — more so than Douglas can handle. She craves his kisses and embraces but never more than the very act of conning. She’ll soon be calling victims without giving lover-slash-employer notice, a move that’ll be disastrous both for Douglas and one weak-hearted mark in particular. I’m rarely one to believe a movie needs to explain itself too much, but Night Nurse’s decision to keep both Eleni and Douglas almost completely opaque is better suited to a short film dramatizing the detail-stingy titillatation inherent in a sexual fantasy than something feature-length, where one’s patience is likelier to be worn thin if there’s no real emotional pull to hitch oneself one to or actual sense of consequence. 

The already-divisive Night Nurse has routinely earned, since its Sundance premiere in January, comparisons to Canadian freaks David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan. They’re accurate when applied to Bernstein’s eerie, airless style, shakier in relation to the emotional limitations of her substance. (She’s also explicitly name-checked France’s Catherine Breillat as a personal hero; you can feel, in Night Nurse, the latter director’s yen for sexual-taboo exploration and women leads who shirk societal expectation.) Yet the conviction, self-restraint, and proud oddness of her presentation nonetheless make me look forward to what she’ll do next. Debuts scarcely have Night Nurse’s same admirable audacity — conspicuous lack of worry about the ungenerous ways they might be seen.

Header image courtesy of IFC