Leonie Benesch is one of those seasoned European actors who wins awards and garners serious critical acclaim without breaking out in a big way. Her lead performance in the education drama The Teachers Lounge, as a Polish immigrant instructor trying and failing to defuse a student-faculty contretemps in a German public school, was a masterful evocation of flawless intentions that totally misread a serious situation; and her supporting stint as a German-English interpreter in September 5, about the murder of the Israeli judo team by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics, brought the tension of the circumstances to the surface as her character becomes the first to actually foresee the disaster. In the Swiss-German co-production Late Shift, she again plays a woman under crushing pressure, though in this case the pressure is not cumulative but incessant. Floria Lind is one of only two fully licensed nurses on duty during the “late shift” (basically, late afternoon to midnight) at a modern public urban hospital that is seriously understaffed. From the moment she arrives on the job, Floria is beset with multiple crises, some fairly routine, some life-threatening, and must get through them the best she can. Benesch’s special talent in this instance is the way she embodies her character’s practiced professionalism while conveying the frantic helplessness that’s gradually undermining her emotional equilibrium. It’s an unbearably taut thriller dressed up as a medical melodrama; The Pitt, but with the action centered on a single staff member.

As with all hospital dramas, this one is composed of individual patient stories that are treated in episodic fashion, as Floria tries desperately to complete her rounds in an orderly fashion. Each patient has unique needs and particular demands, and Floria is experienced enough to know how not only to satisfy those needs when she can but to work around them when she can’t. When an elderly woman with dementia becomes desperately disoriented she sings her a German lullaby that connects on a primal level. After a seriously depressed woman’s colostomy bag comes loose and her line falls out, Floria ignores her withering, fearful complaints and replaces the line with care and in silence. “It’s the first time anyone’s gotten it right the first time,” the woman remarks, impressed. Floria can be short with her subordinates and knows how to pass the buck when a patient gets too impatient, but she also knows she will have to pay for these shortcuts in the long run and the movie’s director, Petra Volpe, makes sure that payment comes due later in the movie. Toward the end, as the story’s pace intensifies and Floria’s temper frays to the breaking point, Volpe resorts to more real-time scenes that come across as single takes (they’re not, but she’s nothing if not a master of editing continuity), and the viewer is thus inundated by Floria’s feeling of helplessness.

Some of these outcomes are dramatically trite. The movie’s heavy is a harried corporate executive who is paying with private insurance and thus insists on special attention. His own personal anxieties get the better of him after Floria explodes with an act of foolish bravado. Both have crossed the line—she in terms of occupational protocol, he in terms of basic human decency—and their mutual resolution to the conflict feels contrived, as if it were designed to let some air out of the movie. The small glimpses into Floria’s private life—she has a small daughter but is separated from her partner—seem more like cliches than insights. Title cards at the close of the film inform us of a global nursing shortage, a touch that, while affecting and important, casts a clinical filter over all we’ve just witnessed; but it can’t dispel from your memory that look of quiet panic on Benesch’s face as Floria tries to catch her breath between each stop on her rounds. That look becomes seared into your brain. 

In German, French and Turkish. Opens March 6 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670). 

Late Shift home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Zodiac Pictures Ltd./MMC Zodiac GmbH