Both intimate and politically urgent, Late Shift, by the Swiss director Petra Volpe, captures a nurse’s ordinary hospital shift on a Swiss surgical ward. We quickly come to see, however, that ordinary does not exist in that world. Thanks in no small part to the understated emotional precision and physical intensity of the lead actor, Leonie Benesch, the figure of the struggling, hopelessly overstretched female caregiver functions as a powerful cipher for the devastating impact of broken systems on those who operate within them.
Volpe, best known on the international stage for The Divine Order (2017), has an eye for the quietly radical. While her last film tackled the (shockingly late) arrival of suffrage for women in Switzerland in the 1970s, Late Shift takes aim at the personal and social costs of extreme structural neglect in modern healthcare. Adopting the cinematic conventions of documentary realism, Volpe builds up an almost unbearable thriller-like suspense over the course of the film’s tense ninety-two minutes, and Judith Kaufmann’s visceral cinematography invites us to feel the main character’s mounting stress levels in our own bodies.
At the film’s centre is Floria Lind (Benesch), a surgical nurse who begins her late shift in an atmosphere of controlled but precarious routine. This is interrupted immediately by a colleague missing from the ward due to sickness, which creates an impossible situation for the remaining two nurses. A high-stakes race against time ensues. We follow Floria as she moves purposefully down sterile corridors, into dimly lit rooms, past beeping monitors and curtained cubicles. She administers medication, consoles anxious patients and their relatives, repositions catheters, ferries people to operating theatres and back again, while also responding to the constant ringing of emergency buzzers and her mobile phone.
Benesch’s performance is understated but dense with feeling: a flicker at the corner of the mouth, the tightening of a jawline, her eyes widening with fear, the weary slump of shoulders hidden briefly behind a medication trolley. The camera never leaves her side. It is as though we too have punched in for the night, tethered to this ward and its quietly mounting storms. Long takes capture Floria in flow, her sure-footed physical rhythm as she passes through the surgical ward. Athletic and confident, she moves with pragmatic elegance, the camera gliding in tandem with a carefully orchestrated choreography of care. Yet when Floria’s stress compounds, shots fragment into handheld close-ups, replicating her emotional disorientation.
The camera also lingers on her hands as they begin to tremble under the mounting stress, as well as on sterilized instruments, a puddle of diarrhoea on the floor, syringes, damp gloves – details that summon micro-urgency. Emilie Levienaise- Farrouch’s sound design works in clever counterpoint to the camera – when Floria’s tension rises, pizzicato strings evoke ticking clocks, accelerating heartbeats, compounding liabilities, the anticipation of catastrophes. The effect is a seamless marriage of technique and theme: the camera becomes an extension of Floria’s mind-body continuum, rendering powerfully the psycho-physical experience of stress and the spiritual cost of having to race against time.
Shot in a decommissioned Swiss hospital, the frames pulse with tension and motion – Floria walking briskly, checking charts, disinfecting her hands in repetitive, ritualistic gestures – but also with steadily mounting anxiety. Each of the nurse’s actions is precise and skilled, but there is simply not enough time to perform them with the requisite care. Each routine step contains the potential for devastating error. The wrong kind of medication, a missed warning sign – the inevitability of such a mistake hovers over Floria’s shift like Chekhov’s gun, waiting to be fired. And when it finally occurs, it is not because of negligence, but is the inevitable consequence of impossible demands in a malfunctioning system. No matter how committed and caring the individuals within that system may be, there is only so much they can do with their limited resources.
It is worth mentioning that the Swiss health system – gruesomely as it is depicted here – is still in much better shape than the UK’s. Earlier this year, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) released a harrowing report describing working conditions for nurses in the UK. Patients are coming to harm routinely in hospital corridors because of understaffing, space shortages and a lack of vital equipment. Because of the extreme emotional toll that such conditions take on those who wish to administer safe and stable care, many nurses are quitting working in A&E, and indeed in the NHS altogether. The RCN found that the numbers of nurses leaving within ten years of registering rose by 43 per cent between 2021 and 2024. Poor physical and mental health, burnout, low morale and lack of appreciation are the key reasons given for leaving the sector.
Floria is no martyr. Caring, competent and professional, she is also fallible. Her heroism (the original German title of the film is Heldin – “heroine”) does not present itself in a melodramatic manner. Rather, it is manifest in the quiet persistence with which she continues to show up for her patients and take time she does not have for moments of connection, offering her care not as sentiment, but as practice and action. We are left, however, to consider whether it is in fact heroic to give our all, and more, in structures that are harmful to those who work in them, to fight what may look like losing battles in dying systems. Are the few moments of grace worth the price Floria is paying?
Because of the film’s preponderant bleakness, the moments of genuine connection amid the chaos hit all the harder: a lullaby sung in duet with a frightened, disorientated old lady; a compassionate gaze exchanged with a dying mother; a hand lingering on a lonely patient’s body a little longer than necessary; arranging a dead woman’s shawl with the tenderest of care; moments of unexpected collegiality between equally exhausted co-workers. At the end of her shift, on the bus home, there is even a reconciliatory imagined encounter with the ghost of a deceased patient. Floria does push back on occasion, and at one point her anger bubbles in tandem with the water cooker when an entitled private patient rages about a late cup of tea.
Late Shift is a deeply humane film, and while it is acutely empathetic, it does not romanticize its subject. This is not a hagiography of the angelic, all-suffering nurse. Instead, Volpe explores the difficulty of delivering care and grace under tremendous pressure in an under-resourced system. Like so many real-life wards in Switzerland, the UK and many other countries, this fictional ward is chronically understaffed. There is no time to eat, no moment to rest. The pace and pressure are relentless.
There is no denying that Late Shift is an earnest film on a serious subject, but what makes it resonate is its refusal to offer any neat resolutions to the dilemmas it presents. There is no triumphant final scene. Instead, there are moving moments of mini closure, or at least of temporary calm, as Floria’s shift concludes. The film ends as it began: with a bus ride through the dark, fluorescent lights flickering in the background. Floria is clearly exhausted. So are we. And so, of course, are the millions of real-life Florias returning home after caring for others, often at the expense of their own wellbeing.
Volpe insists on making care visible, paying tribute to the quiet heroism of those who wipe bums, clean wounds, change sheets and hold hands at the edge of death. Not merely a portrait of a nurse, her film is a portrait of our times and our failures. Late Shift deliberately puts the invisible labour that underpins much of our civilization centre stage, and draws attention to the paradox that those who perform it are often the most disregarded. It asks us not only to see Floria properly, but also to consider why we so rarely do. Unsurprisingly, the nursing profession is facing a serious recruitment problem – not just in Switzerland and the UK, but globally. Volpe’s film helps us to understand why.
Anna Katharina Schaffner is an executive and burnout coach. Her new book, The Story Solution: Change your toxic self-story and thrive, will be published next year
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