Late Shift: strained workplace drama is carried by Leonie Benesch as a dangerously overworked nurse

Floria (Leonie Benesch) is exactly the kind of person you’d hope to see appearing at your bedside during a hospital stay. A dedicated and efficient nurse, Floria approaches those in her care with patience and empathy, providing a calming reassurance to the lonely and fearful. She remembers to bring lollipops for children visiting their mother, and she takes the time to sit and look at dog photographs with an elderly man who has no visitors, even if we can see in her face that her mind is buzzing with the countless other things she needs to be doing right now. In every respect, Floria is a model healthcare professional.

By the end of Petra Volpe’s Late Shift, Floria’s ability to operate with grace under pressure has been tested to the limit. The film follows this nurse over a single evening, beginning with small talk among colleagues and a pair of box-fresh white trainers, which will look much less fresh by the end of the night. Almost as soon as Floria begins her rounds, things start to go awry. The hospital that Floria works in is severely understaffed, which adds to her already significant workload, and she must take a young intern under her wing in her colleague’s absence.

Judith Kaufmann’s camera glides after Floria as she makes her way down the hospital’s corridors and into the patients’ rooms, but she can barely get from one person to the next before being pulled off course. A fellow nurse requires help changing an old woman’s soiled garments; an increasingly frustrated family demands updates on their mother’s condition; patients need transporting to and from the operating theatre; the daughter of a recently discharged patient calls asking if anyone has found her mother’s spectacles. Late Shift is a drama of gradual accumulation, as a series of seemingly small and mundane issues pile up around Floria until she doesn’t know which way to turn, and the sense of screws tightening is accentuated by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s metronomic score.

Late Shift was released in Switzerland under the title Heldin, which translates as ‘heroine’, which indicates the point Volpe is making, even before she closes her film with stark statistics about the country’s chronic shortage of nurses. It’s a tribute to the people who work tirelessly to look after the sick in a dysfunctional system, and a warning that such a situation is unsustainable. The more you demand of nurses, the more you push them to the limit, the more likely it is that mistakes will eventually creep into their work, which inevitably happens to Floria here.

In İlker Çatak’s The Teachers’ Lounge (2023), Benesch showed how adept she was at playing a character trying to maintain a sense of equilibrium while frequently on the back foot, and she brings a similar combination of authority and anxiety to her performance as Floria. Benesch has large, expressive eyes, which she uses to communicate the conflicting emotions that Floria is working so hard to keep in check, particularly in the film’s final third, when her more pallid complexion makes those eyes even more arresting. With scant time given to characterisation, Volpe relies heavily on Benesch to carry Late Shift and pull the audience into Floria’s experience, which she does with conviction and unflashy skill. Heldin is the word.

Volpe’s writing can be strained and obvious, as in the portrait of a belligerent businessman, who – despite a late attempt to humanise him – feels crudely written as a one-note bastard. A situation involving his expensive watch is the film’s broadest and least convincing turn, and it feels unnecessary when what really resonates are the smaller and more intimate moments of humanity that Volpe captures: the way Floria sings a lullaby to soothe a confused old woman; the elegant scarf that she places around a recently deceased patient’s neck; a casual conversation between Floria and a cancer-stricken woman who knows the end is coming. The film’s compression of such a range of emotional states into a tightly edited 92 minutes can feel nerve-wracking and suffocating, and we share the feeling of catharsis when Floria steps outside the hospital towards the end of the film and finally lets her pent-up emotions spill forth, but she allows herself to cry for less than a minute before she regains composure, wipes her eyes and walks back inside. It’s a brief scene that sums up the whole film. There’s no time for tears; she has work to do.

► Late Shift is in UK cinemas 1 August.