Ratched

No creative or narrative decision in the show really makes sense, and everything is much more intense than it should be. Yet you can’t help but be riveted and swept up. There’s something almost accidentally spellbinding about it.

It is all the most excellent fun. Paulson conveys a fathomless darkness while appearing to do almost nothing. When moments of viciousness break her affectless surface, it is genuinely disquieting.

Ratched works very well as a moody, sensual thriller even if it's not so much an intellectual exploration.

Ultimately, though, this is a thoughtful, moving examination of the repercussions of trauma, and a reclamation of queerness and femininity from a genre and source material that has treated both with contempt.

The drama (all eight episodes were provided for review) never seems to settle on whether this corrupt and eccentric woman is the hero or the villain of her own story, the aggressor or the victim. Watching Sarah Paulson navigate those extremes is chilling. ... These inconsistencies work together to make Nurse Ratched more terrifying in her unpredictability. ... But where Ratched really shines is through its stylized love of gore.

The pleasures of “Ratched” are dulled by the constraints of IP maintenance. ... Still, it’s a credit to Romansky that “Ratched” remains watchable in spite of the conflict between inspiration and obligation.

Through it all the performances of Paulson, Davis, Cynthia Nixon (as Paulson’s potential love interest) and Sophie Okonedo (as a mental hospital patient) keep “Ratched” watchable even as the quality droops under the weight of too much melodrama.

“Ratched” is garish and gorgeous all at the same time; horrific and occasionally poetic; glamorous to an almost laughable degree; thrilling for a while and then puzzingly dull for stretches, only to become interesting all over again. The show is a fine and flawed example of who Murphy is and what he makes. You can’t help but be lured in by it.

Not a great show by any stretch, because it does suffer from the same narrative bloat that plagues many of Murphy’s other series; there’s simply too much going on here for any one story to be fully satisfying. There’s something entertainingly bold about its vision, and the Crayola-bright world these characters inhabit is a fascinating one—almost despite itself. Ratched is kind of a mess, yes, but can be a compulsively watchable one.

Sharon Stone is a vengeful heiress and that’s all she is; Corey Stoll is an incompetent hitman and that sums him up. This isn’t acting, it’s posing. Happily Judy Davis and Sophie Okonedo — both Oscar nominees — do eventually develop juicy parts. And “Ratched” becomes watchable entertainment. But that style-over-content thing makes you wonder if Ryan Murphy shows would be better off with less Ryan Murphy.

When it's not being too gross to watch or too ridiculous to matter, this series is a treat for the eyes. [28 Sep - 11 Oct 2020, p.9]

Because it’s like some 1950s melodrama, “Ratched” is quite attractive initially. ... Instead, it's just a shirttail relative of "American Horror Story," another series that isn't always sure what it wants to do.

Thanks to the compelling work of Sarah Paulson, one of Murphy’s regulars, Mildred isn’t a completely absurd construct whose sexual role play is out of left field; she’s intensely present and motivated in each scene. But when you step back to understand Mildred, the pieces don’t fit together. ... In this slick, inconsistent series she’s more a jumble of qualities whose truths are coyly withheld from us.

Though it occasionally mistakes “scary” for “hard to watch,” Ratched displays a lot more narrative discipline. And yet the whole feels lesser than the sum of its parts. But what parts!

Your mileage may vary on how well it explores that idea and the cheap, convenient plot devices that pad it out into eight episodes, but if it’s a spectacle you want, that’s what Ratched somewhat delivers in its performances and production design. The overall narrative could have used a second opinion, though.

The whole tone of Ratched feels like a point extremely missed, and it can’t even generate its own upside-down gravity. At times, its rudeness is just crude.

The resulting character, swoony in love, a loyal if misguided friend, a competent administrator, a practitioner only of techniques she believes help, is more sympathetic, but also more banal. No longer a chilling avatar of implacable, self-satisfied state violence who needs no reason to exist other than that the system will always find people like her to keep running, Nurse Ratched is now just another poor, misunderstood antihero.

There is no order or sense to the way Paulson behaves. What to say about the portrayal of mental illness, except that the usually reliable Sophie Okonedo hams it up royally as a character with multiple-personality disorder? “She’s lost her mind. I think she’s lost several of ’em,” says Nurse Bucket, which just about sums up the show’s subtlety.

In the latest bastardization of intellectual property, producer Ryan Murphy's Ratched is basically "American Horror Story: Cuckoo's Nest," a sort-of prequel starring Sarah Paulson as the quietly unbending nurse from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," casting her into a florid sea of stylish noir excess. Big, showy roles from a star-studded cast abound, but it's mostly in the service of glossy garbage.

Unfortunately, “Ratched” turns out to be a bloody bore. The eight-episode series is less a character study than it is a horror show, where the gore spills all over nifty period costumes and fancy production design.

If a stylish thrill ride is what you want, “Ratched” may do the job. It’s a wild drive through the dark in a pristinely restored roadster, even if the driver often seems to forget the destination. But if you’re actually looking for what “Ratched” promises, a nuanced explanation of a woman who’s been caricatured as a demon, you may find yourself wishing that you could have met Mildred Ratched before “Ratched” got to her.

Ratched is a bunch of disparate influences (the score periodically quotes Elmer Bernstein’s Cape Fear theme, among others) thrown together simply because they could be, and not because they fit together, or add up to more as a group than they did individually. The Nurse Ratched from the film would not approve.

Though the quality and consistency of "Ratched'"s writing dramatically deteriorates around its midpoint, Paulson’s dedication to finding the pulse inside the brittleness of the ice queen archetype makes her compulsively watchable—and the first four episodes, at least, give her a main through-line that is worthy of that performance. ... The show takes a hard pivot, as if it’s auditioning to be some secret season of "American Horror Story" and indulges in that series’ worse impulses.

Yes, the production design is breathtaking and the campy dialogue provides a few dark laughs, and the actors are clearly having a good time taking juicy bites out of the material, but the histrionics become tedious and there are far more gross-out moments than genuinely frightening developments. The end result is one big bloody bore.

“Ratched” is a far cry from a faithful prequel to the landmark book and film it’s inspired by, but far more troublesome is how bad the series is on its own. Forget the IP; these first eight episodes don’t hold together as, well, anything. Part ’40s melodrama, part early aughts torture porn, “Ratched” isn’t frightening, affecting, or even all that interesting. It’s thrown together folly and nothing sticks.

It takes all eight episodes for Ratched’s sibling heist to come to fruition, but by that time the plot has become so convoluted that it barely matters. ... Perhaps this is the central weakness of “Ratched”: there is nothing bubbling underneath the surface. Romansky and Murphy throw everything at the screen, and all at once.

What "Ratched" has in excess, which is saying something, are grand performances from extraordinary actors playing the hell out of parts that don't live up to their talents. ... But what came out of the other end of this treatment is an unhatched egg of a narrative entirely consumed by style.

It will surprise no one familiar with the Murphy brand of horror to know that Paulson crushes the material she’s given, and that the physical world she and her costars inhabit is uniquely lush, peculiar and macabre. It’s a shame, then, that it’s also frustratingly opaque, gratuitously unpleasant and shortsighted in its attempts to be as grim and grisly as possible. By the season finale, anyone asking why we needed a Nurse Ratched backstory like this may walk away even more confused.

Murphy’s productions always tend to favor style over substance — aside from FX’s triumphant Pose, which finds the beating human heart inside its flamboyant characters — but this might be his emptiest effort yet.

Ultimately, Ratched fails to deliver not just because it doesn't have a handle on its lead and can’t locate its horror, but because it has limited vision and poor follow-through. The elements of this story are so inelegantly mashed together that they may as well have come out of a blender.