Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | February 3, 2026
I don’t know if we’ll ever get big flashy erotic thrillers like we once did during their Verhoeven heyday of the 1990s, but Night Nurse—director Georgia Bernstein’s first film, which just premiered at Sundance—shows the preeminent sub-genre of sleaze a strange new path forward into its future if we feel like grabbing it by its hips and climbing on. A psycho-sexual day-dream that flicks away at the bean of nurse-patient fantasy, flipping scripts and prescriptions as power structures fizz out in a methadone haze, this is a cinematic incision into the sick and perverted. [Complimentary.]
It’s the first day on the job for Eleni (Cemre Paksoy), the new nurse on the block at a gated retirement community, and right off the bat from across the wading pool an older fella’s caught her eye. His name’s Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), and he doesn’t read as old as the other geezers bobbing about—he’s still handsome, virile-seeming, and there’s a sharpness to his gaze that immediately captures Eleni’s fancy, the splish-splash of the rec center fading into the distance.
She’s entranced from frame one. So when Eleni’s superior Dr. Mann (Mimi Rogers, who once upon a time starred in a few of those erotic thrillers of yore herself) assigns Eleni to be Douglas’ night nurse, she can’t sign that clipboard quick enough. Passing batons with the day nurse Mona (Eleornore Hendricks)—an elliptical sort herself, with a twinkle in her own eye—it’s Eleni’s duty to see to all of Douglas’ needs once the sun’s gone down.
If this sounds like the set-up to every other Penthouse Forum letter ever written, you should yank your hopes away from visions of sweaty stethoscopes nestled between heaving bosoms; director Bernstein is more interested in subverting the tropes we know from the past. There will be no slo-mo Seinfeld-ian sponge baths here. Night Nurse (much like the pre-Code 1931 Barbara Stanwyck classic that shares its title, although this is decidedly not a remake) is interested in what’s fueling its titular character — where her allegiances lie, as crime and perversion seep through the blinds like nitrous oxide. And where her own obsessions might twist into madness.
Douglas has the hypnotic effect of a cult leader, and Eleni’s only the latest to fall under his spell and succumb; indeed it seems as if 90% of the home’s candy-striped staff are shirking their duties to lay around his rooms in states of stoned bliss as all of the other patients go ignored. Even worse, part of his kink is seducing his caregivers into robbing these same elderly via telephone scams—one-sided phone-sex scenes where Douglas stiffens at the sight of his girls convincing the more feeble-minded to hand over their savings. (Yes like the plot of Thelma, but sexy.)
But Douglas meets his match with Eleni, whose instant enthusiasm takes even him by surprise—her sub tendencies are so dominant that the entire equilibrium’s thrown off. And we always stan a power bottom!
Inevitably, before long, Eleni’s not happy with just having night-nursing duties, and wants Douglas to herself. But as before, don’t go imagining the high theatrics of Sharon Stone wielding an ice-pick here— this is not that movie. Instead, Night Nurse grows more claustrophobic and entombed within Douglas’ carefully curated liminal space. Day and night coalesce in murk; time floats away in an ether haze. And all anybody knows is they want to lose themselves further, deeper, harder into the abyss. Dementia by decree.
Bringing to mind movies like Steven Shainberg’s Secretary or Bruce LaBruce’s Gerontophilia—movies where people with atypical desires find their needs being met in ways that the mainstream, on its surface, finds untoward—Night Nurse is more than happy to press our buttons. The decrepit stereotype of the old pervert grabbing at his nurse’s bottom never saw this one coming, and it’s about time he got this surprise in return.
