As it so often goes in my apartment on nights when we’ve all come home to unwind after work and school, my roommates and I found ourselves scrolling through Netflix trying to find something to watch for the night. What we ended up watching kept us hooked for the next week.
Ratched is Ryan Murphy’s and Sarah Paulson’s latest project, adapted from the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nurse Mildred Ratched is a uniquely horrific mental health nurse who manipulates her way into a job at the Lucia State Hospital following Edmund Tolleson’s imprisonment there for the murder of four priests. Without revealing too much — as the whole point here is to obviously get you all to watch it — here’s the premise: Nurse Ratched has some relation to Mr. Tolleson and, by the end of the first episode, it’s no surprise. She finds ways to torment the other patients at the hospital, all while working both for and against Dr. Hanover — the lead doctor and a lobotomy enthusiast. By the middle episodes she’s managed to work her way up to Head Nurse, a position she took from her more than slightly unpleasant coworker, Nurse Bucket. By continuing to pull all these strings, and plucking off some lives along the way, Nurse Ratched leads us to a fully unraveled backstory with a (gay!!) ending that they posed perfectly for the second season.
The show itself is beautiful. There are some interesting color choices made throughout — mostly blues, greens, and a lot of orange. The women all wear bright lipstick that calls attention to their lips almost every time they’re on camera, but it gets darker as everyone’s secrets get revealed. The attention to detail was something I very much enjoyed catching, as visual aesthetics can be so helpful in setting a tone. After scenes of body horror, there were shots where all you saw was red, for instance, and all of those moments made the art direction feel so akin to what we know and love of The Shining.
As for the story, I told you, we were hooked. The plot is definitely American Horror Story-ish, so if you’ve binged all of AHS like me, you’ll be totally invested. There is palpable tension between the characters that keeps you on your toes, even when you think you know what’s coming. I will say though: definite gore warning. Ratched makes you feel nothing short of sick sometimes, which sounds in line with Paulson’s favorite characters to play. The creep factor made me feel so ready for Halloween, and the way every storyline started adding up got me pretty empathetic towards some of the characters. Others…not so much. To be honest, I don’t even think I fully know how I feel about Nurse Ratched herself.
All in all, Ratched was a psychological trip in eight episodes, and I’m already thinking about what they might think up next season. Tune in on Netflix and let me know if you have any thoughts! I would love to hear them, and you can share them with me on Instagram @juana.bernal or on Twitter @juanaabernal!
