MIND GAMES (RATCHED)

It either takes a lot of guts or a misplaced confidence to take a character from another writer's most celebrated work and build a drama around them.

But that is what Ryan Murphy sets out to do with 'Ratched' - a Netflix series constructed around Ken Kesey's manipulative nurse in 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'.

Mildred Ratched was memorably played by Louise Fletcher in an Academy Award winning performance opposite Jack Nicholson in Milos Forman's Oscar garlanded 1975 movie of Kesey's novel.

Regarded as one of cinema's nastiest villains, Murphy has turned to Sarah Paulson to take on the role for his Netflix TV prequel.

Fans of 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' will be surprised that Forman's film does not really influence Murphy's series.

The realism of Forman's comedy drama is sacrificed for the high camp of classic Hollywood melodrama and film noir.

Murphy and his fellow directors Michael Uppendahl, Nelson Cragg, Jessica Yu, David Lynch's daughter Jennifer and Daniel Minahan are too busy saluting other melodramatic films and filmmakers to worry about Forman's masterpiece.

Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho' and 'Vertigo,' Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining,' Roman Polanski's 'Chinatown,' Todd Haynes' 'Carol,' Jonathan Demme's 'Silence of the Lambs,' Martin Scorsese's 'Cape Fear' and Howard Hughes' 'The Outlaw' get referenced instead.

And while Hitchcock's influence particularly dominates, the look and tone of Murphy's series also evokes the spirit of classical Hollywood melodramas by Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk.

Murphy's series gets off to a very grisly start with four priests being slaughtered by Finn Wittrock's Edmund Tolleson in their parochial house.

With many people demanding his execution,  Edmund is transferred to the Lucia State Mental Hospital in northern California to assess if he is mentally fit enough to face the death penalty.

At Lucia, he is placed under the charge of Jon Jon Briones' Dr Richard Hanover and Judy Davis' head nurse Betsy Bucket who are wooing Vincent D'Onofrio's Californian Governor for funding.

Aound the same time, Paulson's Mildred Ratched arrives at the hospital, insisting she has a job interview arranged with Dr Hanover even though no-one, including him, has any record of it.

Mildred, a former field nurse during the Second World War in the Pacific, manages to engineer a job by arranging ta patient's death in Dr Hanover's office and helping him cover it up.

Her arrival on the nursing staff upsets Betsy Bucket who immediately sees her as a threat.

It soon becomes apparent to the viewer that Nurse Ratched has anotger motive for being in Lucia because of a past connection with Edmund.

However her efforts to help him are further complicated by the presence in the cliffs side motel she is staying in of Corey Stoll's hitman Charles Wainwright, who has been hired by Sharon Stone's wealthy heiress Lenore Osgood to kill Hanover.

Lenore wants Hanover's head delivered to her disturbed  son, Brandon Flynn's Henry Osgood who lost his arms and legs in a previous encounter with the Filipino doctor.

Mildred and Wainwright flirt in their motel but she also attracts the attention of Cynthia Nixon's Gwendolyn Briggs, a press secretary to D'Onofrio's Governor George Willburn.

Gwendolyn is a lesbian involved in a sham marriage to Michael Benjamin Washington's gay man Trevor Brigg but her romantic advances to Mildred are initially rebuffed.

As the series unfolds, there are power struggles galore in the mental hospital, clandestine sexual liaisons take place between various characters, there are tonnes of deceptions and lots of very unpleasant acts of violence resulting in a high body count.

Murphy and his writers, Evan Romansky, Ian Brennan and Jennifer Salt lather the story in lots of camp melodrama, with the dialogue delivered by the cast in a classic 1950s Hitchcockian style.

Costume designers Lou Eyrich and Rebecca Guzzi and production designer Judy Becker bathe the series in vibrant colours, bringing a sinister, glossy hotel chic to the Lucia mental hospital and even finding some glamour in the decor of he grotty motel run by Amanda Plummer's nosey alcoholic Louise.

The soaring strings of composer Mac Quayle's score heighten the dramatic tension and he borrows some riffs from Elmer Bernstein's 1991 take on Bernard Hermann's score for J Lee Thompson's 1962 version of 'Cape Fear'.

Murphy has made his name as the creator and showrunner for shows like FX's plastic surgery drama 'Nip Tuck', Fox's musical drama 'Glee,' FX's horror anthology 'American Horror Story,' FX's 'Feud: Bette and Joan' and the Netflix's series 'The Politician' and 'Hollywood'.

All these series also have the same campy, soapy quality as 'Ratched'.

But arguably what sets Murphy's latest series apart from the rest of these is the quality of its cast's performances which often outshine the source material.

In the title role, Paulson is terrific as the manipulative Nurse Ratched.

Rather than regurgitate Fletcher's passive aggression from Forman's film, Paulson is in firm control as the campness is dialed up around her 

Paulson's Mimdrex Ratched exudes confidence,  calmness and calculation but occasionally she allows the audience to see her character's vulnerabilities.

Nixon has never been better as the career woman who falls for Ratched, while it is great to see Judy Davis' back in a high profile role as the haughty Nurse Bucket who also has her vulnerabilities. 

Sharon Stone has a ball, channelling her inner Bette Davis with a delightfully mean spirited turn as a wealthy heiress and supet protective mother.

Lenore sweeps through her scenes with a pet monkey on her shoulder - a clear winner for visual metaphor of the year in a TV drama.

Alice Englert announces herself as an actress of note, with a spiky performance as Dolly, a nurse with a taste for bad boys who fixes her gaze on Edmund.

Briones is excellent as Hanover, a doctor with a taste for sodium pentothal and a few several skeletons from his past.

Stoll, D'Onofrio, Flynn and Washington have fun in their supporting roles, while Charlie Carver has a touching turn as a disfigured war veteran on the nursing staff, Huck Finnigan who bonds with Mildred.

Harriet Samson Harris and Annie Starke also catch the eye as two patients who embark on a lesbian affair, with the latter being subjected to the cruelest of treatments in a scalding bath to cure her of her desire for other women.

It is great too to see another blast from the 1980s and 90s, Rosanna Arquette back as a social worker from Mildred and Edmund's past, while Plummer revels in her role as a boozer with an acid tongue.

Sophie Okenodo arguably steals the show as a schizophrenic whose multiple personalities appear to be as s result of s past trauma.

Finn Wtitrock is an unsettling presence as Edmund, full of sneer and eye rolling menace one minute and then sentimentality when in the presence of animals.

But for all these pluses, Murphy's series undoubtedly has its flaws.

The chief one is that in insisting every element has to be played big, that means the violence has to be particularly repellent.

So when the violence erupts, its nastiness is as off putting as it was in Oliver Stone's heavy handed, hyper violent 1994 serial killer tale 'Natural Born Killers'.

A scene where Hanover demonstrates a lobotomy for guests in an operating theatre also seems too lurid and is replicated by Mildred.

A visit by Mildred and Gwendolyn to a marionette theatre seems too clever by half - with the puppets being used instead to tell the disturbing story of Nurse Ratched's life.

'Ratched' is one of those series that will very much be like Marmite for viewers.

It will be loathed by some and adored by others.

However it is never dull and it works hard to make the case for a second series.

Does Murphy and his team of writers and directors do enough to justify a further expansion of the Cuckooverse?

I think so.

But it will be interesting to see what stars will be attracted to the second season of a show with an abnormally high body count.

However with its strong female parts overshadowing the male characters, it is not hard to see why some actors will be attracted.

Paulson is undoubtedly its ace card but there are plenty in 'Ratched's hand to suggest this is a gamble might pay off big time in series two.

(Season one of 'Ratched' was made available for streaming on Netflix on September 18, 2020)