Driven by a complicated personal mission to take a job at a very specific mental institution (Lucia State Hospital) at all costs, Ratched plots a very deliberate path to personal employment and advancement, threatening various lives along the way.Īlways perfectly accessorized and outfitted to impress, there’s a palpable desperation to her actions that hints at vulnerability the show never fully explores beyond listing the many disturbing, terrible things that have happened to her. She’s conniving, manipulative, and tortured by unexplained inner darkness from the very beginning of the show.
Here, Nurse Ratched (played by the always great Sarah Paulson, a key staple of Murphy’s stable of regulars for years now) isn’t so much an everywoman as a complete sociopath. For those of us who’ve spent the better part of the last decade watching the increasingly decadent and self-indulgent twists that regularly pop up on his American Horror Story anthology-a series known for its bonkers plots, campy, lavish style, and frequently unsatisfying endings-this show will feel wildly familiar.
Because Ratched is a Ryan Murphy series, and that means that it isn’t a character study so much as a bombastic combination of competing plots and themes, topped off with riotously bright colors and a heaping dose of gratuitous sex and violence. In Ratched that is … incredibly not the case.Īnd honestly, maybe the joke’s on all of us for not realizing that this is how things would go from the start. She is terrifying precisely because she is so relentlessly normal, a rigid bureaucrat turned heartless by an oppressive system rather than a singularly monstrous horror. That woman-who didn’t even have a first name-represents the banal and ordinary nature of evil. This version of Mildred Ratched bears almost no resemblance to the character portrayed by Louise Fletcher in the 1975 film adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel. Part of the problem is that while there’s actually a surprising amount to enjoy about Ratched, it’s an utter failure as the prequel that was promised to us. In reality, it’s something of a slow-moving car crash: Kind of entertaining to gawk at from a distance, but a big old mess up close. On paper, Netflix’s Ratched is supposed to be a prequel to the Oscar-winning film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a series dedicated to delving into the backstory of the woman who would eventually become one of the most iconic villains in cinema.
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