Movie Spotlight: Night Shift with a Beauty Queen

In February 1961, Marilyn Monroe was committed to Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. She was put in a locked room with no civilian clothes and no visitors. Joe DiMaggio had to intervene to get her out. The whole episode lasted about a week. In the decades since, it has been mentioned in footnotes and glossed over in documentaries. No film has gone inside it.

Sonia Gill wrote, directed, and stars in Night Shift with a Beauty Queen, playing Marilyn herself. The project began in lockdown, when Gill worked through every Marilyn Monroe documentary she could find and kept arriving at the same gap. She had a dispute with the creators of another stage show about the same topic, one she had been part of. In four days, she turned what had been building into a script. By September 2021 she had self-published a book through Barnes & Noble Press New York. By April 2022, she was filming at a studio in London. She traveled to Los Angeles in June 2023, then again in May 2025 to reshoot deleted scenes.

Three Meanings

The title holds three things at once. Marilyn’s documented fear of night. The night staff at Payne Whitney who watched over her. And the fact that she was found dead in the early hours of August 5, 1962. Gill holds all three together without choosing one.

The Footage That Almost Didn’t Exist

Her cinematographer deleted the footage and went to India. Not metaphorically, the footage was gone and the person who shot it left the country. Gill flew to Los Angeles twice to rebuild the film. “I didn’t give up,” she says. The film would not exist if she had.

Norma Jeane Versus Marilyn

The duality at the center of the film is the one Marilyn carried her entire life: the distance between who she actually was and the image the world projected onto her. The script draws on the Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan blacklist years, when Marilyn’s loyalty was pulled in two directions at once. Gill sees her less as tragedy than as creator. “Just like Van Gogh who was taken off the streets during a manic episode and locked away in an asylum and created Starry Night,” Gill says. “Marilyn was taken to Payne Whitney during a manic episode.”

The Timing It Found

Gill didn’t engineer the fact that the film arrived on Marilyn’s centennial. It just did. She started filming in April 2022 at a studio in London, following what had already become a multi-year project across a book, a script, a crew betrayal, and two trips to Los Angeles. The film was ready when it was ready, and the calendar agreed.

What to Know Before You Press Play

Gill is direct about what the film is and isn’t. “This is not another blonde movie,” she says. Some of the nurse scenes are exaggerated. “But the bones of it are true. This really happened to her.” What the film asks is that you sit inside it with her, and consider what it means that nobody else has.

Drama

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Streaming now on Relay.