Most of us dread the thought of entering the broken-down labyrinth that is the American healthcare system, yet we’ll happily watch hours of hyper-competent hospital employees bark jargon and scramble to save lives on TV. Medical dramas that put the E.R. into “stressful” get rewarded with statuettes, eyeballs, and endless season renewals, and anyone entering the world of writer-director Petra Volpe’s Late Shift will immediately feel right at home. The setting is a Swiss hospital. The hero — Heldin, the German word for hero, is actually the movie’s original title — is a nurse on the verge of a nervous breakdown during a dusk-to-dawn rotation. The genre is the sort of recognizable staple that throws algorithm-dependent streamers into a tizzy. Do you love The Pitt? Check out this European arthouse equivalent!
It’s a bit too reductionist to make a one-to-one equivalent between the hit HBO Max medical series and Switzerland’s shortlisted entry to this year’s Oscars, which hit select theaters in New York and Los Angeles this weekend and goes into wide release on March 27th. The Pitt is an ensemble drama, albeit one anchored by Noah Wyle’s big Dr. Zaddy M.D. energy, that spreads out the triumphs and tragedies among a large cast and many close-to-real-time episodes in a Pittsburgh emergency room. Late Shift follows a single staff member in a cancer ward, named Floria and played by the extraordinary German actor Leonie Benesch, for a tightly wound 90 minutes.
Yet it’s easy to see why the comparisons began to fly after the movie premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2025, roughly a month after the series debuted in the U.S. Both of these projects focus not just on the people who run themselves ragged to help the sick (though these physicians can’t heal thyselves), but on the way the institutions they work in have been pushed to the brink. The healthcare crisis isn’t strictly a domestic concern. It’s a global one.
Floria has barely donned her scrubs and started her shift before she’s informed that the hospital is severely understaffed today. From there, things rapidly progress downhill. She’s quickly forced to juggle tasks ranging from administering IVs to fielding phone calls about missing glasses. The ward’s occupants run the gamut from anxious to entitled; several treat Floria like she’s their personal valet. Relatives of the infirm want answers. Patients get impatient. Shit hits the fan early and often — or in the case of one incontinent geriatric, the floor.
Occasional hints about Floria’s life outside of work are dropped — an exchange with a Turkish patient receiving chemo treatments casually reveals that the nurse is divorced, with a kid — but we’re essentially riding shotgun with her as she tries her best to keep it together. That’s enough to give you a sense of who this woman is, as well as the fact that she’s well suited to the profession. Action is character, and this is a character study paced somewhere between observant and Safdie-level panic attack. Floria is in constant motion, flitting from one indignity and wound treatment to the next, though the movie allows her to pause long enough to sing a lullaby to a frail woman. The gesture of tenderness speaks volumes. Still, the fact that her attention is being split between dozens of life-or-death responsibilities, all of which must be dealt with stat, is taking its toll. Floria is only human, and she has a breaking point. First, do no harm. Second, try not to throw a wealthy douchebag of a patient’s watch out the window, especially if it costs as much as your annual salary.
Leonie Benesch in ‘Late Shift.’
Music Box Films
When an incident involving painkiller dosage courts disaster, however, we begin to see how such understaffed hospitals and their overworked employees seem to constantly teeter on the edge of complete meltdown. If you know Benesch primarily from her work on the German period drama Babylon Berlin, you’re already aware of her chops as an actor. Those who were lucky enough to catch her in The Teachers’ Lounge (2023), a tense look at an educator navigating a volatile environment, can also attest to the fact that she’s an expert in pinpointing the moment that someone’s grace under pressure ruptures and cracks. Bit by bit, Benesch shows us the psychic exhaustion of someone tasked with keeping hope alive in the face of death, of tending to the sick and the terminal in their time of need, of trying to maintain a sense of stability in an environment of missing patients and mixed-up meds and the eternal devastation that always accompanies the sentence, “I’m sorry, we did everything we could….”
It’s an intimate look at the fraying of nerves that happens when dealing with the fragility of the human body on a daily basis, a portrait of the caretaker as a soldier in the trenches. Late Shift‘s villain is not mortality, however, so much as burn-out — yet another thing the movie has in common with The Pitt, whose still-in-progress second season has upgraded the subject of essential worker fatigue from subtext to text. It ends with a disclaimer that notes how 36% of nurses in Switzerland leave the job after four years, and that the World Health Organization estimates a shortage of 13 million healthcare practitioners by 2030. The statistics are indeed cause for concern. Yet the film also exits on a note of extreme sublimity, courtesy of a final-shot callback puncturing the realism that’s defined Late Shift up to that point. It’s put Floria through hell. A brief glimpse reminds her why she does this, and why we need far more Florias, now more than ever.