Oraetta Mayflower

Oraetta Mayflower is a home-care nurse in 1950 Kansas City, all pep and Minnesota vowels, fussing over an elderly patient with cheerful, motherly attention. She hums, she chatters, she calls herself things like 'Nurse Mayflower' with pride. Underneath the sunny bedside manner is something colder, tending toward harm rather than healing.

Jessie Buckley plays her like sunshine with a blade in it, all bright vowels and unblinking eye contact that never quite matches the words coming out of her mouth. The writing keeps her motives opaque just long enough that her warmth reads as menace, and Buckley makes every scene she's in feel like it could tip either way.