I finally got around to watching this because I noticed that Netflix was already featuring multiple documentaries about this same story so I figured there really must be something to it in order to warrant the appearance of multiple 1.5 hour features about the same topic.
After watching it I realized that while the topic and the story is sound, this rather eventless story would have been better represented as a documentary rather than a full-length feature film.
I think this film came into being based on the recent interest in real-crime stories that was at least from my perspective, inspired by the popularity of the Dahmer series that was one of the best shows that Netflix has had in quite some time. The killer in question here, Charles Cullen (played by Eddie Redmayne) was a far more prolific killer than Dahmer or almost any other serial-killer but it involves some really terrible coverups on the part of various hospitals who, if the film is to be believed, helped to conceal that wrongful deaths happened on their watch, presumably to prevent wrongful death lawsuits.
The performances by the actors in the film are really good, including and especially Eddie Redmayne who actually acts a great deal like Jeffrey Dahmer, or at least the way he was portrayed in the Netflix special. Perhaps that was Eddie's inspiration.
The real life Charles Cullen is still alive and in prison and it is unknown how many people he has killed because the hospitals involved are not being cooperative, nor are they legally obligated to do so, in providing information to what patients he had access to. It's a pretty chilling tale when you look at the entirety of its parts but this film suffers from not really having enough material to make for an entertaining 2-hour runtime. The fact that they made the movie that long, and the fact that they focused moreso on other characters such as the investigators and Charles' friend, made the movie less interesting IMO.
There really isn't much action at all in this movie and there are only brief moments where Charlie is presented as someone that needs to be feared at all. He certainly isn't a physically intimidating character and his motivations are never really addressed in the movie at all but instead, the actions that lead to his eventual arrest and conviction. I would have preferred that they HAD approached the film that way but his involvement in anything including the deaths isn't focused on really at all in the movie. We are left to our own imaginations as far as this is concerned.
One could argue that this was done intentionally to shed light on the corrupt methods that hospitals use to protect their own profit margins even though they are dealing with the lives of patients in the meantime. Anyone that has ever gotten a rather heartless bill from a hospital that they cannot pay has probably felt some tinge of what this is all about and in that regard I applaud that they would focus so much on that aspect of it. That being said, it doesn't make for a very entertaining 2 hour showcase.
Get ready for a ton of talking and a bunch of rehashing the same information over and over again as you get a bit frustrated that things are not moving forward faster than they are. If this is a real reflection of how justice operates in the USA over such an event, it is pretty angering and probably something that the families of the victims continue to be angry about to this day.
Should I watch it?
I think that this one is a 50/50 split. I don't think you really need to watch it because you can get a lot more information just by spending 5 minutes reading the Wiki about it. However, if you want to get more frustrated about the health-care system that currently exists in the USA perhaps this will add a bit more fuel to your internal fire. If this film is an accurate representation of that in any way, it's pretty frightening. I know that I won't ever look at it the same way again but I honestly don't think I needed to spend 2 hours of my time watching a relatively repetitive sequence of events in order to make that happen.