RATCHED (2020)

REVIEW BY: ROBERT CHANDLER

I’m feeling mixed about Ryan Murphy’s new series, RATCHED, based on the story of Nurse Ratched, as featured in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST. 

Sarah Paulson lifts anything, we know this. But, Ryan and his team have created a series that is so shockingly heightened, any drama that ought to be rendered by this fascinating character’s backstory ends up being shorn of nuance because it tips too frequently into melodrama.

Aesthetically, it’s as though Murphy was inspired not by Hitchcock’s VERTIGO or, say, J Lee Thompson’s CAPE FEAR, but by DePalma’s Hitchcock movies (notably SISTERS, OBSESSION and DRESSED TO KILL) and Scorsese’s Cape Fear. In other words, it’s a pastiche of pastiches of original works of art. And it’s compounded by the score by Mac Quayle, which lifts every one of its moments from the Bernard Herrmann playbook, turning RATCHED into a retro-noir pantomime in vivid Technicolor.

Twice, in the opening episode, Nurse Ratched walks down a long (shock) corridor and, as she walks, with the Herrmann strings sawing and scissoring behind her, the lighting state changes so that the corridor colour shifts from a calm neutral tone to a disturbing, nursing-smock green… as though signifying a change in Nurse Ratched’s state-of-mind. Yet the change isn’t warranted by what is happening in the story. The aesthetic and the design, while technically impressive, end up undermining instead of underlining the drama.

I’d like to complain, too, that the men are too frequently gay-beautiful (the killer, the priests, and the mentally-ill patient in the asylum are just too handsome); while some of the women look as though they have strolled in from a hagsploitation movie (see the Amanda Plummer and Judy Davis characters).

And yet… Murphy knows how to tell a story. 

RATCHED is a great yarn. The story blocks pile on top of each other beautifully until they topple into revelation. 

Episode one was compelling.

 A great moment between Sarah Paulson and Corey Stoll in a motel bedroom was genuinely touching, and disturbing. Vincent D’Onofrio and Cynthia Nixon are terrific as the state governor and his wife. And, as stated upfront, Paulson lifts everything in which she appears. She’s excellent.

But she’s not my Nurse Ratched, my Louise Fletcher, whose performance in Milos Forman’s 1975 film was nuanced and vulnerable, even while she was being tyrannical.

What next for Ryan Murphy, who appears to have trouble getting people to say no to his wish-list projects? Blanche & Baby Jane Hudson, The Vaudeville Years.