There’s a crusading aspect to Late Shift, made explicit in an on-screen endnote about the shortage of nurses worldwide. Focus on a particular to create the universal is the idea, Petra Volpe’s film following a single nurse for a single night as she deals with patients in an understaffed Swiss hospital.
The writer/director is lucky to have Leonie Benesch as her star. She’s particularly skilled at playing woman out of their depth, both in the public sector (as in 2023’s The Teachers’ Lounge) but more generally too – see 2024’s September 5, or the early episodes of German TV show Babylon Berlin, which lost a lot of heft when she left.
Here, it’s a case of a single woman trying to keep the show on the road. Floria Lind (Benesch) is a sweet and capable hospital nurse getting a handover briefing as the film opens. She then spends the rest of the night dealing with whatever comes her way until the next shift takes over. This starts with a demented patient who has soiled herself, but varies wildly over the night from a pair of reading glasses mislaid, a diabetic who’s dangerously not eaten his dinner, a routine operation, a hugely abusive male patient, a woman having a sneaky cigarette while hooked up to an oxygen bottle, and so on, which the bright, respectful, friendly but firm multitasker takes in her stride.
I watched this at home and had to pause the action a couple of times to let the tension dissipate. Which is not what you usually get from hospital drama (that said, the German TV show Krank Berlin is pretty good at that too).
It wouldn’t be a drama if something didn’t happen, but Volpe’s skill is in escalating the tension by piling incident on incident. Rather than throwing a massive emergency into the mix, this is a tale of quiet everyday heroism, which will repeat the next night and the night after, Floria only keeping her cool by an effort of will.
The big-picture story is underfunding – and if Switzerland is bad god help us all – too many patients and not enough nurses, and doctors who are making themselves scarce at crucial moments because they’re overstretched too. More broadly Volpe asks the question being posed by populations all over Europe – we used to do this sort of stuff pretty well, so where has all the money gone?
The camera is on Benesch the entire time and it’s pretty easy to assume that she and Floria are in some respects the same person – intensely capable, cool under fire, making a tough job look easy. Who knows, but if you are familiar Benesch from other films, she’s very much a known quantity here – relatable, girl next door. There is a good reason why she’s always working. So far this decade she’s made about five films and seven TV shows (writing this in May 2026 so there will doubtless be more).
How many balls can one person juggle before they drop one? And which one will it be? These questions kept me on the edge of my seat and, as said, hitting the pause button. Volpe, if you don’t know her, has made her name with a bunch of feelgood movies, such as The Divine Order and Golden Years, not to mention Heidi. So Late Shift comes as quite a surprise – a completely different sort of film-maker is on display here.
It’s a simple film in many respects but that means there are fewer places for an actor or director to hide. Both Benesch and Volpe come through. This is a shift worth working.
Late Shift – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
