(L-R) Bruce McKenzie, Mimi Rogers, Cemre Paksoy, Georgia Bernstein, Eléonore Hendricks, and Colleen Rose Trundy attend the Night Nurse premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at The Yarrow Theatre on January 26, 2026 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)
By Erik Adams
A mighty cheering section has turned out for Night Nurse’s premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. When writer-director Georgia Bernstein takes the lectern at The Yarrow Theatre, the response is one you’d expect to hear after a movie at the Festival — and this for her debut feature.
Bernstein tries to downplay the noise. “I have a lot of family here,” she says. Also: By her count, 27 members of the cast and crew are in attendance. Some have come from Ukraine; others are only in Park City for a single night because they’re currently on another shoot. Woody Harrelson, whose affiliation with the film isn’t immediately apparent, lets out an unmistakable “Yeah” after Bernstein thanks producers Liane Cunje, Veronica Barbosa, and Lucy Rogers.
The ruckus suits Night Nurse. It’s engineered to provoke a reaction — bold, daring, mysterious, and directed with an abundance of style by Bernstein. The closeups of a coiled telephone cord stretching across patches of skin and a crisp, white nurse’s uniform playing under the title sequence indicate as much. The elegant script of the credits and the jazzy piano chords accompanying them suggest the influence of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. But as she reveals during the post-premiere Q&A, Bernstein had a different erotic thriller by a different David in mind.
“We talked a lot about [David Cronenberg’s] Crash on the movie because it’s an example of an erotic thriller that’s eroticizing something that’s not typically eroticized,” she says. In Crash, that would be car crashes; in Night Nurse, it’s telescammers preying on the elderly by posing as a distressed grandchild in need of quick cash. That’s the type of scam Douglas (Bruce McKenzie) is running, siphoning off the savings of his neighbors in a tony retirement community. He’s introduced a strange, sexually charged element to the con by casting his caregivers as the panicked voice on the phone, feeding them their lines and sneaking kinky details into the script. He meets his match in his new caregiver/accomplice, Eleni (Cemre Paksoy), who pushes the ruse to new and increasingly dangerous extremes.
The roleplay elements aside, it’s a personal subject for Bernstein. Her grandmother was nearly snared in this sort of scam, getting as far as her bank before the teller informed her she’d been had. The scammers’ ability to make her grandmother feel needed, combined with medical-school billboards that Bernstein frequently encountered while living in Chicago, provided the raw materials for Night Nurse.
“They had a woman in scrubs, and she’d be smiling, and it said, ‘It’s amazing to be needed,’” says Bernstein. “And it always struck me as a really bizarre confession to make.”
It’s easy to see why Sundance Institute senior programmer Heidi Zwicker calls Night Nurse “exactly the type of film we hope to find for NEXT.” Its unique form follows its boundary-pushing content. The most explicit imagery is either left to the imagination or occurs out of frame. The camera lurks voyeuristically, glacially pushing in on the subject of any given shot. The score — composed by Sam Clapp and Steven Jackson and, in a rarity for a contemporary movie, recorded live to picture — loops around and around on itself, a quality Bernstein says is meant to invoke the feeling that we’re stuck doing water-aerobics circles in the retirement community’s pool.
Those languid qualities were reflected in the production style, too. McKenzie recalls how the actors played all of Night Nurse’s already long scenes from beginning to end in wide shots, then did the same once Bernstein was ready to move on to coverage. With this technique, the actor says he had “an opportunity to really inhabit the thing in a way that you might not have otherwise.”
To achieve what she set out to do with Night Nurse, Bernstein says “everything had to be as erotic as possible, and as slow as possible.” And given Paksoy’s first, affectionate reaction to this screenplay by her longtime friend and collaborator, it’s clear everything was already erotic as possible and slow as possible on the page. “This girl’s a freak,” Paksoy remembers thinking.
In other words: Night Nurse was provoking reactions from the start.
