Directed by Petra Volpe, Late Shift stars Leonie Benesch (The Teachers' Lounge, September 5) as Floria, a nurse in the surgical ward of a Swiss hospital about to clock in for the late shift. What follows is the most nail-biting account of an everyday shift that you'll have seen on screen this year: it's a 92-minute demonstration of what it really means for a hospital to be "short-staffed."
Volpe's kinetic script doesn't recount Floria's shift in real-time, but it feels like it. The writer-director has spoken in interviews about wanting to honor the "athleticism" of nursing; Floria doesn't stop, because the job doesn't allow her to.
Overworked and understaffed
Only two nurses are working on the ward that evening, and Floria must juggle doing her rounds, taking calls from elsewhere in the hospital and from concerned family members, queries from anxious and disgruntled visitors, a nursing student who's proving to be not quite up to par, and a demanding private healthcare patient.
Pulled in a hundred different directions right off the bat, things start to slip through the cracks as the pressure mounts and an avoidable mistake threatens to derail her whole shift. What follows is a completely gripping film that I couldn't look away from. What's being depicted is only the ordinary day-to-day duties of a healthcare professional, and for anyone who works in a hospital, it might feel like it's stating the obvious. But as someone who's only ever been on the other side of the ward, so to speak, I couldn't look away. Benesch's natural, subtle performance is a major part of what makes this film so watchable: we barely know anything about Floria, but she feels like a completely real person.
Hospital wards have had their fair share of on-screen depictions over the years, especially on TV, from long-running UK soap operas to George Clooney's breakout turn in ER and recent HBO word-of-mouth hit The Pitt. But Late Shift differs from these episodic procedural dramas in that Floria's relationships to her colleagues are not explored – there are brief moments of conflict and solidarity, but mostly there's no time for any of that, which speaks further to the alienation faced by overworked employees.
Similarly, Floria's personal life is only alluded to: a long-term patient asks about a break-up she mentioned when she was treating her the previous year and, when she calls her young daughter on her fleeting break, she doesn't want to speak to her.
Do it all again
The movie ends with on-screen text showcasing some sobering stats about nursing: 36% of nurses quit within four years of starting work. Plus, by 2030, there will be a shortage of 30,000 nurses in Switzerland and, according to the World Health Organization, 13 million worldwide. Just before that, Floria's shift ends. She heads to the locker room and gets changed before boarding the bus home in silence, a mirror image of the movie's opening sequence.
As far as workplace dramas go, Late Shift is to hospitals what Boiling Point or The Bear were to kitchens – except the kind of healthcare depicted in Late Shift is actually a matter of life or death, and with a lot less shouting to boot. The hospital where Floria works is never quiet, with constant alarms, alerts, and cries of pain from patients, but there's a steely silence from the staff: there's no panic and no fighting, they just get on with it. As Floria makes her way home on an unremarkable bus, it's clear that this is just a run-of-the-mill day on the job: tomorrow, she'll do it all again.
Late Shift is out now in UK cinemas. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
