A fragile nurse encounters malevolent forces on night duty in Corinna Faith’s efficient screw-tightener with a feminist slant
In Don McCullin’s 1970s photographs of grinding poverty in the East End, Whitechapel looks like it might have in Dickens’s lifetime. And it’s grim deprivation that student nurse Val (Rose Williams) walks into on her first day on the wards of an east
London hospital in this feminist horror; her first patient is a little girl with rickets and stunted growth. Written and directed by Corinna Faith, this film is a real screw-tightener, ingeniously set during the miners’ strike in January 1974. What could be scarier than the lights going out in a Victorian hospital in the dead of night?
When Val arrives most of the patients are being transferred to another hospital for the night because of a scheduled power cut. Val is on the “dark shift” – staying to cover two wards kept going by a generator. She is too embarrassed to admit that she’s scared of the dark, triggered by childhood abuse in a care home. Pretty soon Val is clinging to the corridor walls, groping her way in the dark – and that’s even before things go bang in the night.