“Nurse at a retirement community gets her kinky kicks when she becomes part of a resident’s scam” is an accurate précis of the story of Night Nurse. Yet it comes nowhere near capturing how weird, idiosyncratic, hilarious, and unrelentingly horny the debut feature from writer/director Georgia Bernstein manages to be.
Pert nipples meet sagging bellies when Eleni (Cemre Paksoy, The Affair) gets a job at a retirement community as the assigned night nurse of an aged huckster, Douglas (veteran British actor Bruce McKenzie). He’s not the regular lovable old scamp one might think, but a fraudster with a special con, one that requires the assistance of the coterie of willing young nurses that work in the facility. However, he soon starts fulfilling Eleni’s GILF fantasies, even if he’s not up for that kind of thing.
“If you’re looking for a pogo stick, I’m really not your guy,” he sneers in his signature blue satin pajamas. It’s highly likely that, a few decades ago, Douglas would have jumped those young bones, but no number of blue chews can now perform that little act of resurrection. The only act of penetration here is when Douglas hooks one of his harem of white-clad co-conspirators to an IV at a party.
It’s a tough call for a movie to be truly subversively erotic, especially when it depends on a series of interlocking and pretty out-there kinks. Douglas has found something other than sex to get his kicks, even if the flesh were as willing as all the pretty nurses are amenable. Indeed, only the facility’s chief doctor (a quietly caustic Mimi Rogers) can see through his manipulations.
None of this depends upon an unrealistic depiction of Douglas as some irresistible stud. Instead, Bernstein is far more interested in exploring what it is that Eleni gets out of all of this. This isn’t any kind of dom/sub situation, but an exploration of the much rarer caretaker fetish, with the subtle but growing suggestion that there’s something surprisingly predatory about the quiet and restrained Eleni. It’s the way she’s silently watching from around corners, or lurking in the therapy pool, her eyes above the water and her mouth submerged, like a crocodile on the hunt.
Paksoy takes an almost wordless part and builds out Eleni’s quiet obsession and increasingly complicated kink with a restrained feverishness. Douglas is a scumbag, but she’s genuinely unnerving in a part that never falls back on something so trite as violence. Bernstein instead lets her fully explore the off-kilter psychosexual dynamics at play and get into some surprisingly dark territory when it comes to questions of consent, especially when Douglas’ worsening senility and dementia becomes less of an act and more of a medical concern.
As for McKenzie, he brings a certain sickening intelligence to the story, mostly making the audience wonder exactly how much of Douglas’ obviously twisted mind is left. As a depiction of aging in despicable men, it forms an intriguing counterpoint to John Lithgow’s bullying dictator in The Rule of Jenny Pen. McKenzie plays the part with a certain ambiguity about Douglas’ motivations and clarity of thought, which somehow doesn’t clash with Bernstein’s oddball sense of humor. Instead, the perversely entertaining depiction of the two fetishists becomes something surprisingly sweet, verging on romantic. Where prior psychologically-driven fetish masterpieces like Secretary, The Duke of Burgundy, and the more recent Pillion kept a tight focus on their lovers, Bernstein pulls the camera back just enough to let the audience go, “Wait, what? Oh, OK, this is actually weird, it’s not just me.” It undoubtedly breaks the spell a little yet, somehow, dangerous depravity has rarely been so heartfelt.
Night Nurse
2026, R, 95 mins. Directed by Georgia Bernstein. Starring Cemre Paksoy, Bruce McKenzie, Eleonore Hendricks, Colleen Rose Trundy, Mimi Rogers, Keith Kupferer.
This article appears in July 10 • 2026.
