‘The Good Nurse’ star Eddie Redmayne, ‘The Inspection’ director Elegance Bratton honored for real N.J. stories

They gathered to watch the nightmare they lived nearly 20 years ago — only now, up on the big screen.

A group of nurses sat in the audience at the Montclair Film Festival Saturday.

The health care workers were once colleagues of Amy Loughren and Charles Cullen in the intensive care unit at Somerset Medical Center, the real-life setting for the movie “The Good Nurse.”

The movie, which stars Oscar winners Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain, tells the story of Cullen, the serial killer nurse who murdered at least 29 people over his 16-year nursing career in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and Loughren, the nurse who helped bring him to justice.

In the film, due out on Netflix Wednesday, Oct. 26, Chastain plays Loughren, who becomes friends with Cullen (Redmayne) before she learns he is responsible for the deaths of 13 people at the hospital (known in the movie as Parkfield Memorial Hospital). Cullen killed patients by adding lethal doses of drugs like insulin to IV bags (which other nurses could unknowingly use for their patients).

The former nurse, 62, is suspected of murdering many more patients at various hospitals (up to 400), and is currently serving consecutive life sentences at New Jersey State Prison.

Fictional and real-life nurses Redmayne and Loughren attended a post-screening Q&A with Stephen Colbert at the film festival. The event was part of a lineup at the Wellmont Theater that showcased two major films based on real New Jersey stories — both “The Good Nurse” and “The Inspection,” the narrative feature directorial debut of Jersey’s Elegance Bratton.

Redmayne was presented with the Montclair Film Festival’s 2022 award for performance of the year. He dedicated the honor to the nurses who worked with Loughren and Cullen.

The actor, who won an Oscar in 2015 for playing another real person, Stephen Hawking, in “The Theory of Everything,” talked about how he got into the stooped physicality of Cullen, which made the nurse look like a question mark, according to Charles Graeber, author of the 2013 book “The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder,” from which the movie is adapted.

“When you’re playing real people, you never get it right,” said Redmayne, 40. “It’s not documentary.”

Both Redmayne and Chastain attended a truncated version of “nurse school” to prepare for the film, learning things like proper form for CPR.

Colbert, whose wife, Evelyn “Evie” McGee-Colbert, is president of the Montclair Film board of trustees, riffed on Redmayne’s American accent in the film.

“I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, you have a British accent,” said the “Late Show” host, 58, who lives in Montclair. “It’s quite pronounced.”

From there, he touched on the actor’s subtle Jersey accent for the film.

“Could you please yell the word ‘Bruce’?” he asked Redmayne. The actor, who would ride to work listening to recordings of Cullen’s voice, said the praise comes as a relief after working with a dialect coach.

But Loughren, who hadn’t been billed for the Q&A that night, got some of the warmest applause of the evening. Colbert thanked her for saving lives.

She became a confidential informant to help detectives from the Somerset County Prosecutor’s Office investigate Cullen. After he was arrested in 2003, she aided police in getting him to confess to his crimes.

However, Loughren, who started working as a nurse 40 years ago, long held guilt for not realizing more quickly that her friend was sending patients to their deaths. Seeing someone else tell her story finally offered some measure of catharsis.

“I was for the first time able to forgive myself, watching Jessica up there on screen,” Loughren, 57, said of Chastain’s performance.

“The Good Nurse” director Tobias Lindholm joined Redmayne, Loughren and Colbert for the film talk.

The Danish filmmaker (Oscar-nominated “A War”) makes his American film debut with the New Jersey-set drama. His movie that’s been in the works since 2016, with a script from Oscar-nominated screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns (”1917,” “Last Night in Soho”).

Lindholm, 45, said the approach seen in “The Good Nurse” wasn’t an easy sell for studios — having a story that wasn’t focused on the serial killer, but instead the friendship between the hero and the killer (which is a smaller part of Graeber’s book).

In Loughren’s story, Lindholm said he saw the example set by his own mother and other had-working single parents who fight the good fight to change systems.

Loughren, as shown in the film, had to face the ills of the American health care system on two fronts: one, as a patient with a chronic heart condition and unmanageable health care costs, and two, as a hospital employee facing the silence of an administration that seemed more interested in covering up Cullen’s destruction as she tried to bring the truth to light.

“What you see on the screen is very real,” Loughren said, talking about a hospital risk manager shown trying to sweep Cullen’s misdeeds under the rug in the film and send him along to his next job.

“She was promoted after that … once we started to capitalize on people’s suffering here in this country, we lost our soul.”

Lost — and found.

In a Q&A for A24′s “The Inspection,” director Elegance Bratton talked about finding his way as an artist and storyteller after joining the Marines changed the course of his life.

The Montclair Film Festival presented Bratton, 43, with its breakthrough director and writer award for the film, in theaters Nov. 18.

When Bratton told the audience he shot the film in just 19 days, gasps were audible.

Emmy and Tony nominee Jeremy Pope (”Pose”) stars in a searing performance as Ellis French, a gay Marine who enters basic training when “don’t ask, don’t tell” is still law. (That changed in 2011 after former President Barack Obama signed a bill to repeal it.)

“It’s always been hard for me to come to this medium and to see myself,” Bratton said. “It’s very rare that queer Black characters actually get to be a hero, so Jeremy (who is gay) and I would speak often about what it would mean to us at 15 years old to have a movie like this.”

French’s story is Bratton’s own.

The director, a Jersey City native who grew up in Phillipsburg (a place Cullen, who hails from West Orange, once also called home), based the script on his real-life experience being rejected by his mother and forced to live on his own.

The movie is dedicated to his mother, who died just after the film got the green light. Gabrielle Union plays her in the film.

Beyond her electric presence on screen, Union’s performance gave him a gift — closure.

“I was kicked out of my house when I was 16 years old for being gay,” Bratton said, introducing the film, which opens in Trenton and was filmed in Mississippi. “I spent the next 10 years homeless, and when I joined the Marines, I thought I was completely worthless. I thought my life had no meaning. And then I was fortunate enough to have a drill instructor remind me that my value was high, because I had the ability to protect the Marine to my left and to my right. This is why I made the film.

“This movie is for anyone who’s ever felt downtrodden,” he continued. “Anyone who’s ever been (overlooked) and undervalued, and anyone who understands and is moved by the unbreakable bond between mothers and sons. I hope by the end of this viewing experience, you’re reminded that your power lies in your ability to protect one another.”

Bratton became a combat filmmaker when he was in the Marines before studying at Columbia University and attending film school at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He went on to create the 2018 Vice reality series “My House,” set in New York’s ballroom culture.

His 2019 documentary “Pier Kids,” which won the 2021 Independent Spirit Awards’ Truer than Fiction Award, follows homeless LGBTQ youth at New York’s Christopher Street Pier over a period of five years.

The title of “The Inspection” refers to both the inspection of Marines under the watchful eyes of drill instructors as well as a broader test of masculinity, Bratton said.

“For me, this is about sharing with all of you the power of radical and defining empathy,” the director said.

The ultimate message?

“You are enough.”

The Montclair Film Festival continues through Oct. 30; montclairfilm.org. “The Good Nurse” is now in select theaters and on Netflix Oct. 26. “The Inspection” will be in theaters Nov. 18.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.