‘Late Shift’ movie review: Leonie Benesch’s Sisyphean ward of one

A camera glides down a hospital corridor while a nurse moves fast enough that the fluorescent lights seem to blur behind her. Someone is waiting for test results that will probably change their life. Someone else wants tea. A trainee is panicking. Some infernal machine is beeping relentlessly somewhere out of sight. Drop into these opening minutes cold, and you might reasonably assume Dr Robbie or some equally sleep-deprived resident of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre is about to round the corner with a sarcastic aside and a chart that’s already overdue. Still, the resemblance lasts just long enough to be amusing before Petra Volpe’s Late Shift makes its intentions clear. This is certainly not a Swiss spinoff of The Pitt, but Volpe uses the grammar of that genre as a starting point and strips away its episodic escalation in favour of a slow, exhausting accumulation of routine tasks that gradually expose how fragile the entire system actually is.

The filmmaker’s earlier feature, The Divine Order, explored Swiss social change through a buoyant historical comedy, but she now moves in the opposite direction here, with a story that transpires almost entirely over one punishing evening in a Zurich surgical ward. The screenplay draws inspiration from German nurse Madeline Calvelage’s nonfiction account of hospital life, and the premise could not be simpler: a nurse arrives for the late shift and discovers that the ward is operating with barely enough staff to function.

Switzerland later selected the film as its submission for the International Feature category at the 98th Academy Awards, which places Leonie Benesch at the centre of a career stretch defined by characters who keep their composure while institutions around them wobble. Benesch became widely recognised through Germany’s 2023 Oscar submission The Teachers’ Lounge, where she played a teacher navigating a spiralling school scandal, then stepped into the broadcast room chaos of the Munich Olympics drama September 5, and earlier appeared in The Crown. Now, with Late Shift, Benesch turns those instincts into something close to a workplace pressure cooker.

The film unfolds through a chain reaction of ordinary tasks that gradually become overwhelming. Twenty-six patients require attention, and the ward operates with two nurses and a trainee who still hesitates before every decision. One elderly man waits for a cancer diagnosis that a doctor has no time to deliver. A dying woman’s sons hover in the corridor, demanding updates. A young mother with cancer wonders whether treatment still holds meaning. A businessman in a private room calculates his hospital fees in the currency of prompt service and grows irritated when his tea arrives late. Benesch’s Floria moves from room to room, absorbing each request while supervising the nervous student nurse, Amelie. The script rarely pauses to reflect on emotions because the pressure and stress of the work are relentless. So a lullaby sung to calm a confused woman with dementia delays the next task, and a brief conversation about dog photographs offers a lonely patient a moment of human attention — each small act of kindness costs a few minutes, and those minutes accumulate until the ward begins to outrun the people trying to hold it together.

A still from ‘Late Shift’
| Photo Credit:
Zodiac Pictures Ltd

Volpe stages this environment with a controlled minimalism. Judith Kaufmann’s camera trails Benesch through the corridors with persistence while Hansjörg Weissbrich’s editing maintains the sense that several crises are unfolding at once. Benesch carries the film through physical detail and eschews any semblance of theatricality. Her stride across the ward is purposeful and mechanical, her hands repeat the rituals of sanitiser, syringes and charts, and her voice remains calm even as the shift pushes her toward exhaustion. The film’s social texture emerges through those interactions. Nurses perform the constant maintenance that keeps the hospital running while doctors rarely appear, if at all. Class surfaces most clearly in the private patient who treats his room like a hotel suite and believes the price of said hotel suite should rearrange the priorities of the entire ward, which is a small but telling reminder that illness does not flatten social hierarchy.

Volpe closes the film with a reminder that hospitals across the world face a growing shortage of nurses. The point is unsubtle, though the film has already made a finer argument. Everyone understands that healthcare systems rely on workers who absorb impossible workloads, but the scale of that dependence rarely becomes visible until something breaks. The work continues because someone still needs care, and the system continues because people like Floria keep showing up, day after day. If anything, Late Shift spends ninety minutes observing how alarmingly thin the margin is between a functioning ward and institutional collapse.

Late Shift premieres at the Red Lorry Film Festival that will be held from 13 to 15 March 2026 in Mumbai