On demand: "The Good Nurse"

Another battle-hardened veteran of world cinema heads West and takes the Netflix coin. To be fair, Tobias Lindholm's cool, calm procedural eye - honed on TV's Borgen, polished in the course of two features, 2012's A Hijacking and 2015's A War, and further sharpened by his recent small-screen return The Investigation - is far from the worst feature to have brought inside the tent at a moment when the American cinema often seems to have taken its eye off the ball altogether. The true-crime material of The Good Nurse, meanwhile, makes an easy fit with the Netflix algorithms. 1917 screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns has adapted Charles Graeber's non-fiction account of mysterious deaths in a New Jersey hospital in the first years of the new millennium: Jessica Chastain is the tireless ICU nurse and single mother whose own health offers cause for concern over the course of her night shifts, Eddie Redmayne the newbie brought onboard to lighten the workload at exactly the same time the ward's elderly patients begin expiring unexpectedly. The killer's identity, you may have surmised, is hardly in doubt, which allows the film to remain restrained in most respects, broadly resistant to the sensationalism lurking inside its own material. Lindholm dims the lights, hushes the voices, and keeps moving the plot sideways into offices - this filmmaker's natural milieu - where we find a pair of detectives (Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich) digging around and the hospital administrators (led by Kim Dickens, eerily placid in power suits) trying to minimise any liability.

This is where Lindholm's interest in this story lies - in how this case was managed or mismanaged, rather than how it was eventually resolved, and thus in what we might all learn from such an episode going forwards. "It's been seven weeks," sighs Dickens in response to a police request for information. "Eight," corrects Asomugha. Later, the roles are reversed: she informs him that the hospital's electronic dispensing system - which the killer effectively hacked - is called PXYIS and not "PIXIE", as the detective has it. It's a movie for sticklers, in other words; throughout, Lindholm makes a concerted effort to get the details right, avoid trumping any of this up, and thereby honour the dead. What's interesting is that, by avoiding the route-one trajectory, Wilson-Cairns gives herself time and space to investigate other lines of inquiry: her writing is forever alert to the links between work and health, and between healthcare and big business. The Lindholm touch, meanwhile, manifests in the determination to view the leads not as characters in a movie, but individuals caught within an exasperatingly labyrinthine system that sometimes appears as every bit as responsible for these deaths as any one killer. The editorial line - and perhaps only creatives hailing from countries with socialised healthcare might dare to set this out in the context of an American feature - is that a system notionally established to save lives has instead by compromised by money, and now provides easy prey and shelter for monsters. It's not quite a thriller, but it might just qualify as a horror movie.

The big question The Good Nurse raises is whether or not this is what the studio system - as it now is, beset by multiple investigations into its own ethics and working practices - really wants. We might draw a less than positive conclusion from the fact that, after the film's festival bow at Toronto in September, Netflix didn't bother to afford The Good Nurse even the cursory one-weekend theatrical showcase some of their other recent productions and pick-ups have enjoyed. There's a certain corporate logic in that. The tension within the movie is chiefly ambient rather than explicit: a note of disquiet in Morten Green's sound design, say. (Viewers led to expect another Coma or Extreme Measures will likely get fidgety after the opening half-hour.) But it's there, nevertheless, and it comes back to the surface around the midpoint as the Chastain character realises she's not just working alongside a killer, but to some extent at his mercy. The glamorous star isn't slumming it here; rather, she disappears inside a character with worries enough even before an outright sociopath comes calling. And Redmayne reminds you what an effective actor - and unnerving presence - he can be outside of movie fantasyland: quietly controlling, pass-agg in scrubs, feeling potential victims out for signs of dependency. All the red flags are there in this performance - you'd have to be truly negligent not to spot them sooner or later - but Lindholm turns the colour down on them, and prevents them from flapping as loudly as they might. One quality Tobias Lindholm may yet restore to the American cinema: subtlety.

The Good Nurse is now streaming on Netflix.