Ratched Review: Netflix Series has Eye Catching Settings But Fails to Make an Impact

It is into this asylum that Mildred Ratched weaves her way, pretending to be a qualified nurse, and soon makes herself indispensable. Her only motive is to save her brother, Tolleson, from death, and she tries this through some very questionable means. Of course, unlike the 1975 Ratched, our lady is kind and gentle, always saving patients from the horrible methods adopted in 1947 to cure them of their psychiatric illnesses, including homosexuality. (Incidentally, it is considered so even today by some.)

However, Tolleson’s haughtiness (including his sexual affair with a trainee nurse) makes his sister’s job all the more difficult. There are other sub-plots – like Ratched’s attraction for the Governor’s Press Secretary, and a peek into the nurse’s early years when she and her brother were abused in the foster homes they grew up. We also have a story on Mrs Osgood (Sharon Stone), whose son, she feels, has been a victim of a bad experiment conducted by Dr Hanover.

While some of these sub-plots do push the narrative, Ratched’s character gives us no clue for the kind of nurse she turns out to be in One Who Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Which is unlike what we saw in the recent Perry Mason series on Disney + Hotstar that looked like a prequel to the hero whom Erle Stanley Gardner created in his delightful courtroom dramas. Mason is a bumbling private investigator in the series and by the end of which he reinvents himself as a bright lawyer – whose spectacular arguments in Gardner’s books and some films have been a feast for me and many others.

Ratched fails to achieve this. Yes, the series unfolds in eye-catching settings. The hospital looks posh, its staff in neat uniforms and Dr Hanover always sporting designer striped suits. Lucia itself is quaintly picture postcard like. This plushness hides the good and the bad, the tortures (electric shocks and hydrotherapy)heaped upon the inmates in order to cure them. In all this, Ratched is angelic.