James Y. Lee
“They don’t make movies like this nowadays” tends to be a common refrain among disillusioned cinephiles, yearning for the contemporary revival of an often classically-oriented style of filmmaking. But truly, they do not seem to make movies like Georgia Bernstein’s Night Nurse nowadays; a bold new erotic-thriller debut feature with psychologically complicated and fascinating influences, drawing inspiration from various cult filmmakers of eras past to create a film intent on subverting the norms of what it means to “take care” of somebody else.
Night Nurse touches on a lot notions and ideas, among them being themes of obsession, aging, and tenuous power dynamics within the frames of suburbia. Bernstein’s film unfurls the story of Eleni (Cemre Paksoy), a nurse recently hired by a elderly caretaking community who develops a fixation on her newest patient, Douglas (Bruce McKenzie). Douglas is a unique case, an ambiguously ailing sex pest who covertly runs scam calls on other seniors in the community, in which he has his nurses pose as his victims’ granddaughters so he can extort money for his own personal gain. When Eleni grows enchanted by Douglas’s strange flirtations and cunning criminal scheme, Douglas leverages and reciprocates her attention in kind. A bizarrely lustful, undeniably palpable connection quickly ensues between the two of them—a sexual attraction that toes the line with tenuous power dynamics, and is predicated on the exploitation of others.
From there, Night Nurse proceeds to see that dynamic to its logical extreme, always deconstructing who truly has control at any point, and leaning into Eleni and Douglas’s respective performances in the roles they’ve established. It’s a frequently astonishing achievement of deep tonal and narrative specificity, and an exciting display for a new cinematic voice. After running into Bernstein following the film’s world premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, I had the wonderful opportunity to discuss the film with her after the festival, and go through the finer details of her vision for such an unbelievably bold debut feature.
Film Obsessive: First of all, what did the journey to getting this film produced look like? Any particular highlights or hurdles that you encountered along the production process, especially seeing as this is your debut feature?
Georgia Bernstein: For a first-time filmmaker, so much of it comes down to whether someone is willing to believe in you before there’s proof you can pull it off. Night Nurse ultimately came together because of the support of my producer, Eddie Linker, who’s been a longtime champion of emerging filmmakers. He came on board early, trusted the vision completely, and gives directors final cut as a rule — which fundamentally shaped how the film was made.
That level of trust meant we didn’t have to spend years chasing financing or softening our edges. We could focus our energy on actually making the movie we wanted to make. Like most true indies, it was still held together by favors and friends who showed up again and again — but having a producer who believed in the film from the start gave us the freedom to take real risks, which made all the difference.
What previous experiences have you had in film, both on sets or otherwise, that helped inform your work on this particular production?
I originally thought I wanted to be an actress. Then, in college, a very old-school theater teacher did me a favor and told me I wasn’t any good, which made me feel simultaneously crazy and also a little relieved. I started directing shortly after that, but for a long time I was embarrassed to say I wanted to make movies. I thought it sounded delusional, but eventually I had to let that go. When you’re making a movie, everything is working against you, so you might as well get out of your own way.
Before Night Nurse, I produced two independent features, which turned me into an extremely practical filmmaker. Producing taught me how movies actually get made—and, more importantly, made filmmaking feel possible. By the time I started Night Nurse, it wasn’t an abstract ambition anymore. It was something I was already doing.
As we’ve already discussed, your film evidently derives from a wide variety of influences! Your opening credit sequence homages Atom Egoyan’s films from the ‘90s, you visually reference Robert Altman’s 3 Women, and you’ve mentioned David Cronenberg and Catherine Breillat as inspirations as well. What was a common thread among these influences, thematic or otherwise, that you wanted to bring out with a single work of your own?
What connects those filmmakers for me is an interest in desire as something destabilizing and hard to categorize. Egoyan, Altman, Cronenberg, and Breillat all make films where intimacy feels unsettling and unpredictable, and no one is ever fully in control — where emotional logic matters more than plot certainties. There’s a sense of inevitability to these films that I love — a feeling that once a certain dynamic is set in motion, the characters can’t help but follow it to its end. That was a key throughline I wanted to bring into Night Nurse.
Night Nurse was filmed on location in the Chicago suburbs of Northbrook, Illinois, and as someone who’s from there, I feel oddly honored that my hometown joins the ranks of several movies that use the idyll of suburbia as a mask for something taboo and dangerous. What about this kind of upper-middle-class Illinois locale did you feel could serve the premise and story of your film—in terms of specific locations, atmosphere, or otherwise?
I love that you grew up in Northbrook. We shot the film in and around my grandmother’s home there, and that house was always very special to me. I was drawn to how out of sync it felt with the contemporary world — full of outdated furniture and old technology.
Both the story and the visual language of the film really grew out of that house and that feeling of being frozen in time. The surrounding suburb, which is home to a lot of retirees, always struck me as a little eerie — the empty swing sets, the identical houses, the perfectly manicured lawns. With my DP, Lidia Nikonova, we wanted to bring that sense of suburban alienation to the surface of the film’s world.
Music was also a crucial part of shaping the atmosphere. The score, composed by Steven Jackson and Sam Clapp and performed live to picture, creates a kind of suburban vertigo. It’s looping and hypnotic, and quietly unsettling.
Cemre Paksoy is astonishing in this film! From the beginning, Eleni seems restless with fascination, and eventually obsession, about Douglas—and the evolution she winds up undergoing is deeply fascinating in how physically embodied it is. What was it like to work with Cemre and direct her in such a role?
When I wrote the film, I had someone in mind for almost every role. We were making it on an indie budget, so many decisions were driven by practicality. On paper, that practicality seemed to extend to casting Cemre Paksoy as our lead — she’s one of my closest friends, and I wrote the role with her voice in my head. But her actual performance is anything but practical. It’s instinctive, emotional, almost alchemical. She brought something to the film that I could never have anticipated or engineered ahead of time.
Because Cemre was part of the project from the very beginning, she had an innate understanding of how to inhabit this character. We talked a lot about performances like Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher and Sissy Spacek in 3 Women, and where Eleni might fall in relation to those touchstones. But what ultimately emerged was something entirely her own.
We spent days in my grandmother’s house blocking scenes and reading through the script, making sure every line felt right and figuring out how she might move through this world. My role was really to create an environment where she could follow her instincts. Eventually, we were so in lockstep that the character’s choices started to feel inevitable.
Your film touches on themes of caretaking with a worldview that’s contained within a very specific sphere. Douglas wants to ensure that the nurses looking after him are “having fun.” Eleni and the nurses are making sure that Douglas is feeling looked after specifically on his terms. At one point, even Eleni and Douglas’s scam calls are framed as giving their victims purpose by making them feel direly needed in a false moment of emergency. What drew you to telling a story that has such a particular perspective on care and need based on taboos and uneasy power dynamics?
When I began writing Night Nurse, I was reaching the tail end of a long relationship, where dynamics of caregiving and codependency were very active. I was grappling with how the act of care had shifted from something sustaining to something consuming and even blinding. I wanted the film to explore that emotional space where being needed can feel like purpose, and how that devotion can gradually become destructive.
As I was developing this idea of caregiving as a compulsive force, nurses struck me as the perfect container for the story, in part because of how eroticized they already are in our culture.
In order to defamiliarize the nurse as an erotic object, I made two decisions. The first was to set the film in a nursing home, where the more extreme age gap brings an unavoidable sense of taboo. The second was centering the desire in the young nurse rather than the patient — locating it in the act of giving care, rather than receiving it. That was something I hadn’t seen before, and it gave me an entry point into a very specific vulnerability that lives inside the desire to be needed.
It was important to me not to frame any of this through moral binaries. I wanted the film to stay inside its own emotional logic — where everyone desires to take care and where harm emerges not from cruelty, but from devotion itself.
Finally, tell me more about your time in Sundance! How do you feel now that your film has started to see the light of day? What do you feel stands out about the importance of community events like Sundance and other film festivals?
I feel so honored that a movie like ours had the opportunity to be seen and received by an institution like Sundance. It’s a festival with an incredible legacy, where so many of my favorite filmmakers got their start, and I’m still pinching myself that we got to be part of it. It’s hard to let the movie go, but hearing how people respond to it is why we made it.
