Lifetime
The Lifetime network’s ‘Sunday Night Thrills’ movies return with a very (very) slow burn serial killer drama that takes a really long time to get somewhere, and then throws a completely bonkers twist at us in the last ten minutes.
The network’s ‘Who Knew Too Much’ series of films continues with The Nurse Who Knew Too Much, and boy does she. While attending to a patient just out of surgery and still under the effects of anesthesia, Jack Penson begins rambling on about bodies, buried, dismembered, hidden locations … not what we generally see on those YouTube videos of people saying crazy things after getting their wisdom teeth extracted. Nurse Sarah Harwood is a bit unnerved and brings the matter to the attention of her supervisor, Allison, who assures her that it’s just the drugs talking. Penson totally spooked out his roommate David as well as Sarah, but he assures them both the next day that he just watched some true crime shows before the operation. Sure, Jan.
Sarah is still so unnerved by the detailed description Jack gave that she puts a call in to her cop ex-boyfriend Mark, who also doesn’t think a confession made while under the influence of anesthesia would hold up. But Sarah isn’t about to give up, especially as Jack’s behavior becomes more and more bizarre … and just how long does he need to remain hospitalized, because he seems perfectly fine the way he walks around the hospital, so maybe it’s time to discharge him. But no, he’s still there and suddenly David dies under ‘mysterious’ circumstances, and someone locks Sarah in the morgue, dropping the temperature in the room from a balmy 70 degrees (is that really a good temperature to be storing dead bodies?) to 10 degrees, also cutting the oxygen in the room down to 9%. I have no idea how morgues in hospitals work, but I’ve never seen one in any movie or TV show with temperature and oxygen controls (on the outside of the room, no less) with three panel digital displays on the wall … and no telephone in the room, which seems to be necessary since it appears impossible to get a cell phone signal. This is what we call ‘convenient plot devices’. Speaking of plot devices, once Sarah is finally freed, she is also implicated in administering a life-ending amount of some drug to David, so she will be put on suspension for a few days while an investigation is conducted. That gives her and Mark time to pay a visit to Jack’s bakery — he’s a pastry chef by trade and has just moved from New York, via Boise of all places, to this sleepy Florida town … which Sarah finds just as odd as everything else. The young woman who works for him seems like she’s in a cult of one devoted to Jack, so she’s of little help. The investigation also takes them to an old sawmill, where Mark warns the skateboarders there to be careful because help is far away, and then to a farm where they are met with a stern rebuke that they’re on private property, but they are quite curious about a hole in the ground that looks like … a grave. Old coot Walter assures them he has no idea who dug it or why. Uh huh.
Lifetime
Nothing is adding up, but with nothing but time on her hands, Sarah decides to go out for a drink, then she leaves the drink at the bar to go to the rest room, placing a coaster on top. When she returns, the coaster is moved slightly and the bartender tells her another woman thought it was her drink but he stopped her before she took it. Okay, who would think a drink sitting on a bar with a coaster on top was their drink??? Did they forget they sat it there and put the coaster on top? But Sarah just says okay … and drinks it! Girl. Ask for a fresh one, for Pete’s sake. Of course it isn’t long before she’s feeling woozy so she tries to get to her car so she can fall asleep there, but can’t quite make it, and then sees a, yes, Black Hoodied Figure approaching her. As she screams for help, Mark shows up just in time to scare the person off and gets her home to safety. This same figure also apparently locked her in the morgue, but who is it? Penson? He’s still in the hospital, isn’t he? Now that Mark is taking Sarah seriously, they eventually head back to the farm and find more smaller holes, which would fit Penson’s description of buried body parts. She sneaks into the bakery, which is closed but the door is conveniently still unlocked, and manages to set off a silent alarm after the cult member employee leaves. Luckily Mark is there to save her ass again. With more than enough ‘evidence’, they need a confession so Sarah returns to the bakery and confronts Jack, while apparently wearing a wire(?), who has now been released from the hospital. They have a little back and forth and it seems he has admitted to a nationwide killing spree but … he didn’t do it all by himself. There is an accomplice which takes Sarah — and the rest of us — completely by surprise.
The Nurse Who Knew Too Much is not the best thriller Lifetime has ever broadcast. It’s very slow moving, and writer John Dion just piles on one plot device and red herring after another to try to make it interesting. It just feels like an eternity for the story to really go anywhere, and nothing really seems to be adding up … at least not until we finally learn that Jack had some assistance. It’s never even really made clear who is in the black hoodie. The build is similar to Jack’s, definitely not the accomplice, so is he sneaking out of the hospital and back in with some help? I guess we’re not supposed to actually think about that. But then we do find out there were actually two accomplices so perhaps it was the other one. I have no idea. I’m beginning to think ChatGPT helped write this with the prompts ‘pastry chef’, ‘serial killer’, ‘Florida’, ‘nurses’, and this is what it churned out. At least Dion does give us a doozy of a twist to make your head spin and … then it all actually makes a little more sense. Not completely, but just enough to almost forget about some of the other nonsense that didn’t make sense. Director Bruno Hernández does a decent job of moving the plot along, such as it is, keeping us in the dark just as much as Sarah.
Lifetime
The performances are mostly decent. Hailey Rutledge brings a nice determination to Sarah, while also making it believable that she is an average, everyday person caught up in some extraordinary circumstances, her frustration growing as she keeps running up against various obstacles and people who only seem to be humoring her instead of taking her seriously. She really makes Sarah a character the audience can connect with and relate to. Anthony Carvello brings a heavy creep factor to Jack, whether in the way he talks or his wide-eyed stares, there just seems to be something off about him, his mind always plotting silently, at least when he’s around Sarah. There is a totally ick moment when she’s talking with him and she leans in and he sniffs her hair (which does not go unnoticed by Sarah, further creeping her out). He’s very menacing with David, but just as charming as can be with the rest of the nurses. But the bulk of the time he just has to be bizarre, and he accomplishes that with great skill.
Carla Kidd is fine as Sarah’s supervisor Allison, even when she is a bit condescending to Sarah. She’s also quick to accuse Sarah of overdosing David, and even accuses her of leaving a bloody scalpel at the work station, even though Sarah had just clocked in. Where on earth would any of them have gotten a bloody scalpel?!? Sarah Shearburn does a nice job as Sarah’s co-worker and friend Jenny, pretty much the only person on staff willing to stand up for her friend. James Arthur Sims also does some good work as David (giving a David Allen Grier vibe), but why he didn’t just press the Call button when he was in distress instead of pulling all the tubes, wires and IVs off and shambling down the hallway makes no sense (except in the sense that it was just a … ‘convenient plot device’). It’s a shame he met his maker because he probably could have been a good cohort for Sarah in the hospital. Marc-André Drôlet as Mark may have been the movie’s weak spot. According to IMDb, this is his first credited acting role, and while he is fine as the cop, his heavily-accented French-Canadian speaking voice often requires subtitles (and, bizarrely, I thought it was a Spanish accent, and I know quite a few Quebecers and have never had that much trouble understanding any of them), which made it hard to really connect with him or even truly know how he felt about Sarah. How this French-Canadian guy ended up on the small-town Florida police force is one of those questions that make you go ‘huh’? Hopefully it was a good experience for him making the movie, and he can work on honing that accent to tone it down a bit, not completely American, but something that will be just a little more understandable for American audiences.
Overall, The Nurse Who Knew Too Much may lose viewer interest by the midway point, after it feels like the movie has already gone on for two hours, but if you do stick with it, that twist and the decent performances almost make it worth your time.
The Nurse Who Knew Too Much has a run time of 1 hour 27 minutes, and is rated TV-PG.