Biyograficim
Late Shift

Late Shift (Heldin)

Movie · 2025 · 7 people

Petra Biondina Volpe wrote and directed Late Shift, in German Heldin ("Heroine"), a Swiss-German drama from 2025. It carries thriller elements and runs about 92 minutes. In Türkiye it opened on 20 February 2026 as Gece Vardiyası, and in France it is called En première ligne. The script was inspired by Madeline Calvelage's book Unser Beruf ist nicht das Problem: Es sind die Umstände on nursing conditions.

Leonie Benesch stars. Floria, a young nurse on the surgical ward of a Swiss hospital, works with passion and listens to her patients even under stress. When her late shift starts, the ward is short of staff. While she tries to give the same care to a seriously ill mother and an elderly man waiting for a diagnosis, she makes a fatal mistake, the shift begins to slip out of control and a nerve-racking race against time follows. Sonja Riesen, Alireza Bayram, Urs Bihler and Lâle Yavaş are also in the cast.

It premiered on 17 February 2025 in the Berlinale Special Gala section of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival and reached Swiss cinemas on 27 February. Switzerland submitted it for the 98th Academy Awards, and it made the December shortlist. It won four prizes, including Best Feature, at the 2026 Swiss Film Award.

DirectorPetra Biondina Volpe
Production companyİsviçre Yayın Kurumu

Reactions

You can pick up to 3 reactions.

Cast

Only cast members with a profile on this site are listed.

Lâle Yavaş Lâle Yavaş Actor · born 1978 Leonie Benesch Sonja Riesen Alireza Bayram Urs Bihler Doris Schefer Margherita Schoch

Through different eyes

Action & Thriller Fan Puts pace, tension and set pieces first; little patience for slow drama.

It starts out as a drama, but once the shift spins out of control it turns into a genuine thriller. No guns, no chases; the only enemies are time and a short-staffed ward. In my view that stripped-down setup is more gripping than plenty of action films, because the stakes feel completely real. If you want explosions and fights, look elsewhere; the pace here is all about nerves.

Cinephile Looks at script, editing and directing choices; keeps a distance from formula films.

Late Shift's structural choice is crystal clear: one late shift, one ward and a nurse around whom everything turns. Petra Biondina Volpe converts that confinement into a tension machine; telling a drama as a race against time demands real discipline in editing and pacing. Making the December shortlist as Switzerland's Oscar submission and taking four Swiss Film Awards, Best Feature among them, look like the reward for that discipline. My reservation comes from the source being a book about working conditions: in films like this, if every step the character takes seems built to expose the system's failings, Floria risks turning from a person into the vehicle for a thesis. How much the film is worth depends on how well it keeps that balance.

History & Society Lens Asks about the period, the social background and what the work reflects.

The title of the book that inspired the film sums up its point: the problem is not the profession but the conditions. Late Shift does not lay a nurse's mistake on her shoulders alone; it places it inside a ward struggling with staff shortages. It is notable, too, that such a story comes from Switzerland, a country whose health system is considered strong; understaffing and burnout are not just the troubles of poor systems. Anyone who knows the burden carried by health workers will recognise the picture. The film's real value lies in telling all this not in the language of a report but on the human scale of a single shift.

These are not reader reviews: they are short editorial takes written from different viewer perspectives with AI assistance. Reader reviews are below.

Reviews (0)

Log in Log in to write a review.

Comments