A Pitt-like pressure calms but doesn't relent in the subtle, subdued Late Shift

Set over the course of a single shift, where time passes between scenes until the evening fades into an indifferent twilight, Late Shift finds Floria punching in on a spinning-plate routine already in progress. “We can’t even arrive in peace,” she mutters to Bea (Sonja Riesen), just before a professionally brisk introduction to a first-semester student, Amelie (Selma Aldin). As the day shift sprints to freedom, Bea and Amelie are presented as Floria’s only support. Then they’re more or less gone, consumed by the hospital’s machinery as Floria’s focus narrows out of necessity—from an entire half of a hospital wing to the patient lying directly in her view. Some receive care instantly, while others are set perilously on the backburner. 

From there, irritants begin to multiply. One patient is too absorbed in a phone call to follow her instructions, so Floria is late bringing him to surgery. The ward’s most charming tenant, Mr. Leu (Urs Bihler), patiently awaits a cancer diagnosis, only for Floria to discover that the attending doctor has left for the day. A patient’s daughter phones to ask if she might root around the hospital for a missing pair of reading glasses. And then there’s the privileged, private-insurance patient (Jürg Plüss), who complains incessantly about the quality of his tea and the time it takes to arrive. Taken on their own, these moments feel boilerplate, a rehash of quotidian frictions that so often pop up in general hospital melodramas. Volpe eventually arranges them into a potent ecosystem around Floria, their individual needs and demands contributing a sense of fullness to the film’s poignant final shot. No matter where Floria goes, Late Shift suggests, her patients are never far behind.

Even with all these spinning plates, Volpe struggles with maintaining tension despite Benesch’s knack for immediacy and impeccable dramatic timing. She occasionally falls back on obvious visual shorthand that’s beneath the material, like a teapot threatening to boil over, or a camera pan to the comparative serenity just outside the hospital’s windows. This mundanity isn’t much improved by the score, by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (All Of Us Strangers), which rarely rises above a simmer with its plinking strings and piano keys, keeping the time of a leaky faucet when it should thrum like a racing pulse.

That leaves Benesch to power through her character’s many procedures and professional improvisations with a remarkable fidelity to nerve-shredding stress. With little more than a skeleton crew, Floria is forced to be everything for everyone: mentor, therapist, sympathetic ear, and authority figure. Excelling in some roles and biffing others, she’s the film’s only nuanced human being among a parade of stock characters. It’s a magnetic, noble performance that emphasizes the topicality behind Volpe’s opening shot, which glides past a rack of freshly laundered nurses’ scrubs, and poses questions: Who among us is prepared to fill them?

Director: Petra Volpe
Writer: Petra Volpe
Starring: Leonie Benesch, Sonja Riesen, Selma Aldin, Alireza Bayram
Release Date: March 20, 2026