Gore-splattered Cuckoo prequel is slick but struggles to take flight
REVIEW
Ratched Netflix ★★★✩✩
STYLE over substance. It’s a description hurled at hyperproductive Ryan Murphy so often it will undoubtedly be etched on his gravestone – along with a bloody severed head, one or two amputee stumps and a feather boa. It’s true, the Glee creator doesn’t do understatement.
And Murphy’s lavish Technicolor imagination is strewn all over the floor of Ratched like pillows and panties after a whiskey-fuelled onenight stand. Here’s Sharon Stone – and she’s holding a monkey! Let’s start the series with a grisly mass murder of priests by a James Deanlike psycho! Subtle it isn’t.
But when the style is this gaudily addictive it’s hard to drill down too hard into the shifting sands of the substance. Ostensibly a prequel to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, the show focuses on Nurse Ratched, played with ice-cold detachment by Louise Fletcher in the 1975 film.
Here, a youngish Mildred Ratched pitches up at a plush California mental institution, seemingly intent on saving the priest-killing psycho from the electric chair – as they have a connection. Around this fragile hook, Murphy builds a neon-lit homage to Hollywood and Hitchcock with, at its centre, a performance from Sarah Paulson as Mildred that is worth the price of admission alone.
Looking for all the world like a 1940s A-lister, Paulson’s Mildred (inset) is cool and unknowable – but, unlike the monster she is to become, has a beguiling vulnerability too.
As she tentatively tiptoes into an affair with Cynthia Nixon’s political aide Gwendolyn, you can practically see Mildred’s icicles melting. Given room to breathe, this would have been an engaging love story.
The trouble is, Murphy can’t help indulging himself. If you’re a fan of American Horror Story you’ll happily lap up the gore and grotesquerie that Ratched has in spades – keep a bucket handy for the live brain operation. But it undercuts any emotional engagement with the characters, which could have given the story more depth.
So, yes, Ratched is style over substance again. But what style.