The Professional

New film highlights one nurse’s struggle with understaffing

Petra Volpe’s powerful 2025 drama The Late Shift follows a hospital nurse juggling the physical and psychological needs of 13 patients on one intense shift. Viewers see her skill, autonomy, and resilience—but also the inevitable toll that crushing workload takes on her and her patients.

Written and directed by Petra Volpe
Starring Leonie Benesch, Sonja Riesen, Selma Aldin, Alireza Bayram
Zodiac Pictures; MMC Zodiac GmbH; SRF Swiss Radio and Television; SRG SSR

The Late Shift’s original Swiss title is Heldin, which is German for “heroine.” That’s not an unusual concept in the movie world. But this heroine’s mission is unusual: to save people not only from the threat of illness, but also from the health system ostensibly set up to help them.

The movie follows one dedicated nurse on a medical-surgical unit so understaffed that it often seems impossible to provide good care. Over the course of one intense shift, the film shows us what nurse Floria can do for patients. She can give highly skilled technical and psychosocial care, along with strong patient advocacy. It also shows what she can’t do, when she and her only nurse colleague on the unit must care for 25 patients with only a nursing student to help. The results are pain, discord, and errors that endanger the patients, as well as wrenching moral distress for the nurses. 

Floria and her colleagues are mental and physical athletes, as writer-director Petra Volpe suggested in a BBC interview. Volpe reinforces that theme with a locker room scene in which the nurses compare work sneakers. Floria is in almost constant motion. We accompany her in and out of patients’ rooms, as she balances a continuous stream of tasks, needs, queries, and demands—reasonable and otherwise—coming from patients, family, and colleagues. (If we had to choose a specific athletic activity for comparison, maybe juggling on a unicycle?) Her specific challenges range from a resuscitation to a diaper change on an elderly dementia patient, which the film spends enough time on for viewers to get a sense of the logistics. With so many patients, the movie can show a variety of situations. Some patients and families are angry or scared. Others are wistful or resigned. Still others seem at peace. A couple patients even help Floria.

Volpe makes sure we see the quietly extraordinary things Floria can do despite those conditions. Under time pressure, she manages to get a difficult IV needle placed, even while the patient insists that she won’t get it, because no one ever can. That is a display of quick, precise expertise in the midst of perhaps the least helpful kind of aural interference. At another point, Floria deftly calms an agitated dementia patient by softly singing a familiar song. The patient soon joins in. And when an immigrant patient confesses that he feels alone, with no friends, Floria assures him that he has her. 

But understaffing is the main theme, coloring almost everything we see Floria do. She is persistently confronted, by the complaints of others as well as her own professional judgement, with what she simply lacks the time to do, or do well. She cannot adequately monitor patients’ conditions, which can be unstable. She cannot timely address their physical or emotional needs. She cannot be the mentor to the nursing student that she wants to be; her nurse colleague seems to have given up on that. And she makes at least one significant error because the actions of one patient distract her in the midst of her work for another patient. The film avoids simple “life-saver” narratives, but viewers should get the sense that lives are in the balance here.

Floria manages to provide emotional support even to the most difficult patients, but not all the time. She is not, as one patient declares, an “angel.” That patient’s gratitude is an outlier. Only a few of those around Floria show empathy or even seem to notice how close to overwhelmed she is. Volpe suggested to the BBC that she had gotten a sense that many patients today have developed an increased sense of entitlement and disregard for the nurses. Of course, many of those patients are in pain or desperate themselves, so such attitudes would be understandable, at least to some extent. In any case, this overall situation is not unique to Switzerland. It will be familiar to nurses in the United States and most, if not all, other nations.

Floria’s non-nurse colleagues also seem overworked, and that compounds the stress on her. She has to do the jobs of others, especially transporting patients. And she is responsible for patient and family needs that a tech or clerk could meet. Her relations with physicians seem generally good. They treat her with respect and support her, at one point in an important and even touching way. But they, too, seem overworked. Floria spends the whole shift advocating to get a physician to talk to an anxious patient about his grave condition, while kindly trying to assure the patient that the physician will get to him soon. To some extent, this situation could be eased if Floria had more autonomy to discuss patients’ conditions with them, a limit at which she seems to chafe. She berates this physician, as the physician is leaving for the day, about her failure to see the patient. The physician is unrepentant; her day has been desperate as well. 

The movie offers a compelling vision of this cycle of conflict and pain. Floria is absorbing the abuse and anger caused in large part by the understaffing, even though she is the one doing the most to address the situation. She tries not to pass what she experiences along to patients, family, and colleagues. She does not always succeed. But we do not see any of this distress reach those who are ultimately responsible: those who made the staffing decisions, or the society that created the underlying legal and financial structures—except to the extent the patients themselves are part of that society. They suffer. 

Other elements of the film reinforce the sense of people caught in a business machine. The opening shot presents a long row of empty hospital uniforms on hangars, lined up like items on a factory assembly line. That suggests a dehumanized system with little space for people or their needs, a system in which nurses are disposable parts. There are brief but striking indications of the inequities in the overall system. We learn that only patients with private insurance get their own rooms. And one of Floria’s most notable interactions is with a demanding wealthy patient who seems to regard her as room service. Viewers might ask why some in their society, like this man, have watches worth 40,000 euros, while Floria’s unit does not have the resources to provide a basic level of care.

In a few respects the movie might have taken different approaches. Floria’s 13-patient load is apparently the result of a third unit nurse being out, so viewers might get the impression that this shift is unusual and a normal one would be fine. A 1:8 ratio would be better, but it would still make it virtually impossible to provide good care. And we doubt a depiction of that shift would look much less desperate than the one we see. It’s important for the public to understand that this type of shift is common, not an aberration. It seems clear that Volpe understands this, based on her BBC interview, so that element of the film is a curious one. The film also understates the desperation of such a shift by suggesting that Floria would have time for any breaks at all. And some of the tasks the film has Floria doing are shown to be much quicker than they really would be—such as starting that IV or dealing with the consequences of a patient elopement—although such compression may be necessary to push the narrative forward. Floria does not seem to have a nurse manager. The appearance of one could have underlined the profession’s autonomy, even if that appearance would have been to defend the atrocious staffing level. Finally, there is an everywoman quality to Floria, despite her advanced skills. But the subtle and well-prepared Leonie Benesch conveys her casual expertise, her dedication, her positive baseline demeanor, and her struggle to maintain it against her growing distress and outrage.

The film itself is like an athlete, intent on doing one thing well: putting us in the sneakers of a skilled professional struggling to help others in a system that makes that close to impossible. Like Floria, it has no time to waste, but conveys just enough to meet its goal. Watching it can be intense, even stressful. But there are also many moments of grace, to remind us of what the world can be. 

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Please go see The Late Shift in theaters starting today! It is the perfect film to show your friends and family who may have no idea what you do or how important it is.

Reviewed by Harry Jacobs Summers
Nursing Editor: Sandy Summers, RN, MSN, MPH
Reviewed March 20, 2026 

The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the Board Members or Advisory Panel of The Truth About Nursing.