Late Shift

Directed by Petra Volpe
Starring: Leonie Benesch, Sonja Riesen, Selma Aldin
Released 1 August
8/10

Petra Volpe’s powerful, desperate, relentless hospital ward drama concludes bluntly with some terrifying statistics about nurse burnout - how the decline in the worldwide nursing workforce constitutes one of the great health emergencies of our time. After pacing for 90 minutes, in the cheap trainers of Swiss surgical nurse Floria Lind, you fully understand why the burnout happens, but also just how vital the nurses are.

Leonie Benesch was the breakout star of last year’s school surveillance thriller The Teacher’s Lounge, and once again her pale, tired but hopeful face, blinking into overhead LED lights, eyes darting on alert for the next emergency call, is the centre of attention. There’s little back story: we meet her as she takes off her civilian identity, pulls on her scrubs and sets out on one more tour of everyday duty.

It is, it has to be said, a remarkably well furnished hospital in Switzerland. But even so, the team is short staffed, the demands are endless and impossible, and even the Flora can’t help but flip out at the student intern, and eventually, one particularly entitled asshole of a private patient. But mostly she’s a kind of everyday saint - changing incontinence pants, heaving people from wheelchair to bed, patiently arranging transatlantic phone calls, gently counselling ailing patience approaching death, bravely facing grieving families.

It may sound gruelling, but you can’t take your eyes of Benesch - who surely now deserves some comfortable romantic costume drama - for a second. The closing shots, as she finally clocks off and catches the early morning bus home, might be the moving scene you see this year.