Late Shift

Petra Volpe’s Late Shift drops you into a modern Swiss hospital and refuses the comfort of distance. The story stays close to nurse Floria (Leonie Benesch) through a single late shift on a surgical ward near Basel, a stretch of hours that plays almost in real time, in corridors that never quieten down. The sound design does half the work. Phones ring somewhere you cannot reach, machines keep beeping, an ambulance hum sits in the background like a warning. Anxiety is not scored so much as embedded.

What makes this drama sting is that its suspense is not built from revelations. It is built from micro-decisions and micro-interruptions, the kind that pile up until “imminent mistake” stops feeling hypothetical. Viewers become little detectives, too, scanning for the misplaced detail that will turn routine into disaster: an IV line, a label, a note that does not land where it should, a task that takes 30 seconds longer than you can afford. Volpe does not need plot twists because the environment itself is a trap.

The hospital is clearly strained, understaffed, too much to do at once, and the shift asks Floria to supervise a medical student while dealing with a coworker who is not always pulling their share. But the sharper idea here is not “the system is at capacity”. It is that the people the system is actively helping often make it worse. Patients and their loved ones treat care like a consumer service and attention like the real commodity. They time her, test her, demand exceptions and interpret every delay as negligence. Nurses end up feeling like defendants, constantly on trial, constantly having to prove they deserve the authority their job already requires.

Volpe is especially good at showing how multiple hierarchies collide in the same hallway. There is the official medical hierarchy of triage and urgency, and there is the socioeconomic one, with private insurance and private rooms quietly reshaping what “priority” means. Layer onto that the hierarchy of cultural expectations, the belief that suffering must be met not only with treatment but with immediate reassurance, immediate response, immediate softness. In that atmosphere, kindness can start to feel almost wrong, not morally wrong, but logistically forbidden. A pause to admire a patient’s dog photo, a moment to soothe someone who is genuinely distressed, a lullaby offered to calm panic, all of it carries the cost of time, the one resource the ward does not have. One of the most telling details is how human warmth becomes a luxury item.

Even so, Late Shift sometimes feels closer to hyper-realistic procedural theatre than lived complexity. Volpe’s writing is tight and the critique lands, but the shift can register as a calibrated accumulation of stressors, more public service announcement than excavation. If you have seen realism in this register before, it may feel like a compressed version of familiar urgency rather than something that reveals new layers.

Benesch is crucial. If you know her from The Teachers’ Lounge, you can see why she is so effective at playing people who navigate broken institutions without losing their integrity. Floria’s emotional intelligence is almost unnerving in this setting. She notices what matters. She reads the difference between real need and an individualistic tantrum. She calls her daughter, Emma, not as a cute character detail but as proof she is a whole person trying to stay whole.

The story’s cruelty is that it does not announce its worst moment in advance. It simply tightens the screws until error stops being a possibility and becomes a near certainty. Volpe refuses the usual spiral of blame and spectacle, with a mistake immediately owned and a doctor responding with a disarming calm, the kind that treats error as part of the job rather than a moral collapse. The moment lands less as a twist than a bleak illustration of what overload does to attention, and how professionalism means responding to a slip without letting the entire shift become a tribunal.

What Late Shift wisely avoids is turning itself into a tidy lesson. There is no big twist, no neat moral accounting. Instead, the patients become the plot twisters. One family’s impatience, one person’s entitlement, one doctor who fails to communicate when communication is the actual emergency, one private patient turning everything into a stopwatch contest, all of it accumulates into a portrait of a social contract in collapse. We live in a time when people impose their “sonder” over the sonder of others, and here that impulse becomes dangerous, because the ward cannot run on feelings alone.

By the end, Floria pinning a patient’s note in her locker feels like contraband, proof that something human survived the shift. Even her new shoes look like they have been through a battlefield, which is the right image for what Volpe has captured. This is not just a tribute to nurses, though it can be read that way. It is an indictment of what happens when a system is stretched thin and the people inside it start acting like the rules of triage apply to everyone except them.

Reviewed on: 30 Dec 2025