10 great films about hospitals

When botanist Robert Brown looked at pollen grains through a microscope he saw them appear to move randomly – seemingly meeting by chance and going their separate ways almost at once. Perhaps appropriately, cinema often sees hospitals the same way: not particles, but people, colliding before being pulled apart by recovery, circumstance or death.

On television, depictions lean toward heroics and heartbreak (ER, Holby City, Grey’s Anatomy). In cinema, hospitals are more often sites of collapse than cure – places where pressure builds, systems falter and staff unravel.

In the emotional peak of Late Shift, Petra Volpe’s new thriller about hospital staff pushed to breaking point, a nurse gazes out of a ward window after a patient’s death. The camera cuts to the car park below, framing her as a shadow in a glowing square – one of many. Far from offering a comforting big-picture view, this glimpse of the world outside only deepens her isolation.

Frederick Wiseman’s 1970 documentary Hospital ends on a similar, if less introspective, note. After 84 minutes of blood, frustration, projectile vomiting and Catholic mass, the camera cuts to passing traffic outside. Cars glide by in the sunlight, just yards from the chaos. It’s striking how much of humanity is contained within one building – and how distant that pressure-cooker world feels from outside. Life carries on, and there’s both solace and quiet sadness in that fact.

Whether filtered through satire, horror, melodrama or documentary, hospitals are true microcosms, and a litmus test for the health of the society that built them. As Late Shift arrives in cinemas, here are 10 films that show the highs and lows of life (and death) on the ward.

Director: William A. Wellman

Before the Hays Code lowered hemlines and reined in the fun, the early 1930s produced a flurry of pre-Code firecrackers, including Night Nurse, a punchy (quite literally) blend of working-class melodrama and low-rent thriller. What begins as a slice-of-life hospital drama veers into pulpy action with a dark heart, as a trainee nurse (Barbara Stanwyck) tries to save two starving children from their boozy mother and a shady chauffeur (an early-career Clark Gable). Their goal? Kill the kids and make off with the trust fund.

Stanwyck and Joan Blondell are ogled, thrown around and paraded in lingerie; the film ends with a murder so casual it barely registers. But the nurses give as good as they get (watch Stanwyck land one square on Gable’s jaw), and their crackling rapport gives these ‘girls in uniform’ just enough spark to transcend objectification.

It leans into pulp with a wink and a snarl, but beneath the chaos simmers an allegory about power, gender and labour. Doctors are corrupt, private care is for the rich, and the system depends on underpaid women keeping their mouths shut. 

Director: Ingmar Bergman 

Brink of Life occupies an unusual place in Ingmar Bergman’s filmography: both overlooked and pivotal, it was made during a transitional moment in his career, anticipating the chamber dramas that would define his work in the years to come. With its sterile spaces and narrowed focus, it’s an abrupt shift from the mythic sweep of the previous year’s The Seventh Seal to something more corporeal but no less ambitious. This is a piercing study of isolation, unwanted motherhood and bodily failure – territory rarely mapped on screen with such rawness. It was censored in Italy, with its labour scene cut. 

While some criticised the stagey feel of the set, Bergman’s tableau of female suffering is arguably rendered all the more acute against the austere backdrop. A rare shared Best Actress prize between all four leading ladies at Cannes recognised how much this film demands from its actors, who wrench despair from their bodies for Bergman’s unflinching camera. 

Director: Samuel Fuller 

Part pulp melodrama, part national fever dream, Shock Corridor is a boisterous interrogation of American pathology dressed up as a murder mystery set inside a psychiatric ward. With its ‘sane’ interloper plotline, it shares DNA with One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Shutter Island (2010) – Scorsese cites it as an enduring influence.

The premise: a self-serving journalist (Peter Breck) feigns madness to get committed, solve a crime and win a Pulitzer, only to find the lines between investigation and psychosis rapidly collapsing. Subtle? Nope – it’s hysterical by design, an overheated, cacophonous story shot through with flashes of wild creativity (notably Stanley Cortez’s hallucinatory cinematography) and genuine moral fury. Each of the asylum witnesses embodies a specific American trauma, including a Black inmate driven to racism by integration, and a soldier broken by Korean brainwashing. There’s also a room of eager ‘nymphos’, because… well, why not. It’s only partially sympathetic to mental illness, and blunt as hell, but beneath the sensationalism lies a scalding vision of a country devouring itself. 

Director: Akira Kurosawa 

Akira Kurosawa built an entire Edo-period town – complete with aged wood, century-old roof tiles, and even bedding that had been slept in for months – to look authentic for Red Beard, his ambitious three-hour period piece about an arrogant young doctor being humbled by a gruff but compassionate physician. 

A nice counterpoint to Night Nurse (1931) and Red Angel (1966), it’s a film about healing as a moral act, with a protagonist who learns that true care comes from empathy. Dostoevsky’s influence is all over this, with its slow, redemptive character arcs and a belief in transformation through suffering. Long dismissed in the West as sentimental or didactic, the film has aged into something sturdier: a farewell to artistic partnerships (this was Kurosawa’s final collaboration with Toshiro Mifune) and a quiet renunciation of material and social ambition itself.

Director: Yasuzo Masumura

Yasuzo Masumura’s doom-laden intentions are clear from the opening credits: images of skulls mingle with bomb-ripped battlefields and gunfire. Soon after, we’re plunged into a world of shocking butchery where bodies are slaughtered twice – first by the enemy, then under the surgeon’s knife – as a Japanese field hospital churns through the wounded on an industrial scale. The nurses don’t fare much better; it’s a food chain of exploitation, where flesh is the ultimate currency.

This is a rare film about wartime hospitals told from a female perspective, but don’t think for a minute you’re getting M*A*S*H lite. “Nurses need no hearts. Just be quiet and do your work,” says head nurse Iwashima (Ranko Akagi) to protagonist Sakura (Ayako Wakao), a young woman clinging to her humanity in a world that objectifies her and demands she do the same for others. Does her resistance stem from moral conviction or simple inability? It’s beside the point; the miracle is that she manages it at all. As for whether her heart survives the film’s bitter end… that’s another question entirely.

Director: Frederick Wiseman 

Frederick Wiseman has long made a muse of systems and the institutions within them. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that three of his most enduring films are set in hospitals. First came Titicut Follies (1967), a grim tour through a Massachusetts asylum; then Hospital, a plunge into the operating theatres and emergency rooms of Manhattan’s Metropolitan Hospital Center; and finally, the six-hour Near Death (1989), which observes the language we use to navigate the final stages of life. 

Wiseman’s trademark rigour is on full show here, with his camera often capturing entire conversations from start to finish. The visceral mingles with the emotional as he documents open surgery, rotting teeth, hearty vomiting (heads-up, emetophobes) and a woman gasping for breath as tubes are pushed into her failing body. Throughout, weary healthcare professionals do their best to enforce compassionate choices in the underfunded facility. In one scene, a psychologist pleads with a welfare officer to help a patient. The conversation is excruciating – and likely fruitless. 

Director: Cristi Puiu

A camera points at an old man in a grubby flat fixing supper for his cats. He has a headache and nausea, so he calls an ambulance, which takes ages to arrive. Over the course of one night, the aptly named Dante Lăzărescu (played with naturalism by Ion Fiscuteanu, who himself died two years later) descends through the various circles of hell that make up the Bucharest healthcare system, while doctors orbit his failing body as indifferently as planets around a dying sun. 

The film’s realism draws on director Cristi Puiu’s own brush with the Romanian medical system: between 2001 and 2003, suffering from stress and convinced he was terminal, he became a fixture in doctors’ offices and ER waiting rooms. He was also aware of the true case of Constantin Nica, a man left to die in the street after being turned away from multiple hospitals – a real-world event that echoes every paper-shuffle and delayed decision in this film. Cloaked in banality, Lăzărescu’s tragedy doesn’t announce itself, but at some point you’re struck by the realisation that this lonely alcoholic will die soon, and no-one seems to care. 

Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

On the surface, Syndromes and a Century is about doctors interacting with their patients. It’s also a diptych in which stories of thwarted love play out in different spaces – the same characters, the same conversations – filtered once through the golden haze of a rural hospital, and again through the fluorescent chill of a Bangkok clinic. As birdsong gives way to industrial hum, and connection becomes procedure (or goes ungrasped entirely), we descend – literally – into the sterile bowels of the facility. In the gleaming hellscape, pockets of humanity emerge. Look out for an extraordinary scene involving liquor, a prosthetic leg and a woman who breaks the fourth wall with an enigmatic gaze to rival Mona Lisa’s.  

Apichatpong Weerasethakul seems to land in favour of the rural but resists the dogmatism of his contrasts with a work that is both balanced and beguiling. A single image yields multiple, equally valid readings, allowing the spiritual and the human, rural and urban, male and female, animal and human to coexist and transform – with the hospital functioning as a liminal space between life, death and memory.

Director: Christian Petzold

East Germany, 1990. Nina Hoss plays the eponymous doctor, newly exiled from a prestigious Berlin hospital to a provincial clinic under Stasi monitoring. In heavy makeup, and with arms wrapped tightly around her angular frame, she exudes chilly poise, while everyone else – patients, colleagues, the attentive André (Ronald Zehrfeld) – falter under her iron-clad reserve. Occasionally, moments of aural violence cut through the hushed corridors: inside, a teenage runaway howls in fear; outside, wind whips through the trees, as menacing and as omnipresent as the surveillance state itself.

Christian Petzold builds his spare Cold War melodrama like a psychological thriller, though the real tension lies not in whether Barbara will escape the GDR, but whether she’ll allow emotional connection. Between curt medical briefings and strained car rides, humanity seeps in – via the patients, and the floppy-haired doc, whose loyalties are difficult to read. Hoss doesn’t so much soften the character as let a flicker escape the armour. The hospital and its community exert a quiet pull, drawing her in, as they draw her out.

Director: Alexander Nanau

Harrowing, compelling and deeply depressing, Collective charts how a deadly fire in a Bucharest nightclub led a team of journalists (for a daily sports paper, no less) into a rabbit hole of corruption in the Romanian healthcare industry. Dozens more die in hospital, not from their burns but from infections bred in ‘sterilised’ wards. Romanian authorities claim everything is under control. A few reporters decide to check.

What unfolds is a slow, mounting fury – a procedural thriller in documentary form, in which a team of journalists peel back the layers of a public health scandal that stretches from diluted disinfectants to the highest offices of power. Nanau films it all with matter-of-fact intimacy: editorial meetings, phone calls, press briefings, the stony silence of bureaucrats caught in a lie – it’s The Thick of It, minus the gags. As one scandal bleeds into another, a reluctant health minister – a former patients’ rights activist – tries to right the ship, only to find rot at every turn. This is a warning tale of unchecked cronyism and the tragic consequences of prioritising profit over patients.