Ratched 2020 Netflix Streaming

 

Nasty fun. The 8 part series now streaming on Netflix is getting some mixed reviews, but I say see it for the look, the horror and the performances. Based on the famous mean nurse from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest that won Louise Fletcher a surprise best actress Oscar, its an imaginative look back into her sordid past that begins in 1947, the height of Film Noir. Played with dill pickle relish by the Ryan Murphy regular Sarah Paulson as Margaret Ratched who weasels and lies her way into a job at Lucia State Psychiatric   hospital so she can get close to her foster brother a nut job serial killer played by another Murphy regular the always very good and very good looking Finn Wittrock. Filled with film history and references the most obvious one being Hitchcock with a score lifted intact from “Vertigo” and multiple references to “Psycho” along with pieces of music by Philip Glass from “Mishima” and lots of touches and tads of Film Noir especially in the costumes, hair and sets. It really is a visual feast with deep seated and saturated color, pitch perfect mid century art direction and luscious cinematography, which alone makes this a swooned patchwork quilt of beauty and mayhem that will poke your eyes out. The horror and violence is also there with some ghastly scenes of executions, lobotomy, psyched out torture like treatments (we’ll burn and boil that lesbianism out of you) and over the top extreme disfiguration and scarring not to mention the graphic killing of 4 priests that open the show. So kids guess what this is not a series for everyone.  The cast is rich and beyond the pale  filled with many of Murphy regulars along with first timers who huff and puff and pretty much blow the house down. I especially loved Judy Davis who is brilliant as Paulson’s rival in chief Betsy Bucket and the great Sophie Okonedo who plays a sad but demented patient with a towering personality identity disorder (think Three Faces Of Eve on steroids). Also in the cast is Cynthia Nixon, Sharon Stone, and a scary Amanda Plummer.  I laughed on the other side of my face as my mom would tell me when I was not behaving, “you’ll laugh on the other side of your face” she would threaten in her best Ruth Roman look and mode. I think she would have loved this series.