Structured like a documentary but with the escalating tension of a tautly choreographed thriller, Late Shift follows one day in the working life of a nurse in a Swiss public hospital. Floria, expertly portrayed by Leonie Benesch, arrives at work mid-afternoon to discover that the third shift nurse has called in sick, leaving her and her colleague to tend to the two dozen patients on the ward with only the assistance of a student nurse.

Floria’s first patient is an unexpected and out-of-place admission, which throws her routine out of kilter before she has even begun. From that unpromising start, the entire shift becomes a series of tangents and detours, an accumulation of interruptions both minor and significant, trivial and mortal, by people who are frightened, angry, entitled, bewildered, overwhelmed, aggressive, and occasionally – very occasionally – reasonable and accommodating. Floria handles all this with kindness, competence, and a frankly astonishing professionalism, but the strain inevitably begins to tell.