THE STORY – Floria, a nurse, works with great dedication and professionalism on the surgical ward of a Swiss hospital. Despite the hectic pace, Floria manages to look after a seriously ill mother and an old man urgently awaiting a diagnosis with just as much care and expertise as she does when attending to a private patient with all his special demands. But then she makes a disastrous mistake, and the shift threatens to run completely off the rails. A nerve-racking race against time begins.
THE CAST – Leonie Benesch, Sonja Riesen, Urs Bihler & Margherita Schoch
THE TEAM – Petra Volpe (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
While it’s unfair to say that any particular industry was affected more than another during the COVID-19 pandemic several years ago, it’s undeniable that hospitals were at the epicenter of this massive global change. Throughout the world, doctors and nurses were overwhelmed by critical numbers of patients they were neither trained nor equipped to deal with. While Petra Volpe’s exhilarating “Late Shift” never addresses this crisis directly or even flirts with those COVID buzzwords that were on everybody’s lips in 2020, the film is an evident reaction to the healthcare catastrophe that’s arisen in the past few years.
“Late Shift” follows one eventful night in the surgical ward of a Swiss hospital, where two young nurses have been assigned the dreaded late shift on their own. The film unfolds almost entirely from the perspective of Leonie Benesch’s protagonist, Floria, as she finds herself stretched to her absolute limit, dashing between rooms and trying to keep her patients under control as the rest of the city sleeps outside. “Late Shift” explores the daily heroic work nurses perform, particularly as hospitals worldwide have become understaffed and underfunded in recent years.
Tension is everything in “Late Shift,” and the film succeeds on every level at grabbing the audience by the shoulders and never loosening its grip until the credits roll. There’s barely a single moment of quiet in the entire film – and those few that exist only serve to make the inevitable chaos hit even harder – as Floria runs back and forth between her patients, fully aware that their lives are in her hands. Every scene gets more and more stressful than the last, with Volpe’s electric direction putting its foot on the gas and slowly pushing down until everything is moving too fast to look back. The film perfectly mimics the chaos and disorder of the job, putting the audience in Floria’s shoes and allowing us to sympathize with her own stress. It has the same non-stop mayhem of films like “Uncut Gems” or “Birdman,” but its clinical location raises the stakes even higher.
Without a doubt, the most impressive aspect of “Late Shift” is Leonie Benesch’s lead performance. The German actress is absolutely revelatory in this role, and the film wouldn’t have been half as successful without such a raw, vulnerable performance to bring everything together. Benesch wears her expressions so openly on her face that it’s always obvious what she’s thinking and feeling. Still, she also masters the artificial calmness that anybody who’s ever worked in hospitality will recognize. Her controlled facade gradually slips as the film progresses, indirectly showing the audience just how destructive and traumatic this profession can be.
Petra Volpe’s kinetic directorial skills are another aspect of “Late Shift” that deserves individual praise, blending plenty of technically proficient long shots with snappy editing decisions to help convince the audience they’re really in that hospital alongside Floria. At just 90 minutes long, the film somehow manages to make the viewer feel like they’ve spent an entire night alongside these characters without ever coming across as too long or overextended. There’s an impressive energy to all the directorial choices that Volpe makes, never opting for the simple choice that would get the job done quicker but rather bringing the audience along for every moment to maintain that sense of immersion.
There are minutes spent simply walking through corridors, searching cabinets, and restocking supplies that Volpe decides to keep in the final cut, and it helps build this continuous momentum that makes “Late Shift” such an absorbing watch. The entire film is such a confident, arresting commentary on the importance of medical workers in a society that doesn’t value them nearly enough, and the decision to prioritize immersion over efficiency is a very smart one. It’s easy to make an audience cry when the film deals with such sensitive topics as death and terminal illness, but it’s much harder to make the audience feel genuinely tired and strained at the expense of the characters. Volpe’s dynamic direction does exactly that.
The only real criticism of “Late Shift” that holds it back from being an all-time great addition to the subgenre is that Benesch’s protagonist is the only character that truly feels fleshed-out and developed; the entire supporting cast often feels shallow and underbaked in comparison. This isn’t particularly surprising given how little screen time the patients in this ward are given individually, but there are so many subplots that it’s easy to lose track of who’s who. Perhaps the film could have benefitted from a slightly reduced number of characters whose stories would have been given more time to develop and engage the audience emotionally.
Otherwise, “Late Shift” is an excellent drama and an undeniable highlight of this year’s Berlinale so far. It’s not only a star-making vehicle for Leonie Benesch but also an extremely timely film that raises awareness of an ongoing crisis many people aren’t familiar enough with. Many audiences may shy away from projects like “Late Shift” because its realism is too unsettling, but that’s exactly why it’s necessary in the first place.
