'Ratched': this entertaining spectacle provides little dramatic satisfaction

Forty-five years ago, Louise Fletcher won an Oscar for her portrayal of the cold-hearted Nurse Ratched in the film adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Milos Forman. Now creators Evan Romansky and Ryan Murphy have turned their camp and eerie lens on the origins story of one of cinema's most memorable villains.

On close examination, the decision to ground the eight-episode series in the backstory of a well-known popular culture creation actually seems unnecessary and ultimately serves as a drawback rather than an attraction of the series.

In Kesey's original conception, Nurse Ratched was an archetype, standing in for the proverbial "man" against whom RP McMurphy's anti-authoritarian rabble rouser attempted to lead a revolt.

Here, she's a character with a troubled, slowly revealed, dark psychological past whose story is so full of grotesque twists and turns and emotional seesawing that it would've worked just fine on its own terms.

Murphy regular Sarah Paulson plays Mildred Ratched, an ambitious nurse who arrives in post-World War 2 Northern California determined to insinuate herself into the staff of a new psychiatric hospital where the latest experiments in the treatment of the mentally ill are being carried out by the nervous head, Dr Richard Hanover (Jon Jon Briones), and his loopy head nurse Betsy Bucket (Judy Davis).

It's not immediately clear why Mildred has her sights so firmly set on this particular institution, but when a psychotic and much publicised murderous patient named Edmund Tolleson (Finn Wittrock) arrives to undergo an evaluation that will determine whether or not he faces the death penalty, things become a little clearer. The relationship between Ratched and Tolleson becomes the focus of the show.

Ratched begins to manipulate everyone around her to climb up the ladder, attracting the romantic interest of the state governor's aide, Gwendolyn Briggs (Cynthia Nixon), and the begrudging respect of pet-monkey-wielding millionaire heiress Lenore Osgood (Sharon Stone ), who is hellbent on destroying Dr Hanover's career.

As we breathlessly wait to see Mildred transform from depression-era trauma victim into ruthlessly cold and efficient Ratched, Romansky and Murphy use an increasingly over-the-top set of tools to ratchet up the tension to unbearable levels. The cinematic forebear here is Alfred Hitchcock, whose bag of suspense tricks is gleefully ransacked from the get-go. They use a lush, emotionally queasy colour palette, split screens, loopy camera angles and a piercing musical score.

On one level it's a welcome attempt to subvert tired old film noir tropes of the evil of free women in the post-war era through a story that centres on complicated, multi-layered women from different backgrounds driven by similar injustices inflicted upon them by the patriarchy.

On another, more obvious, level, it's an all-over-the-place mishmash of garish caricatures that can't hide the glaring holes in its story. It's an entertaining spectacle to begin with but its charms wear thin as you realise that it's never quite going to deliver the dramatic satisfaction it promised.

The premise of setting the show in a mental asylum where early techniques like lobotomies and scalding baths are used to cure ailments ranging from schizophrenia to lesbianism soon gets thrown aside. This leaves you with the feeling that it could have been set anywhere - that mental illness is just a crazy thing suffered by scary, crazy people who are tragically beyond any real help. Murphy seems uninterested in its potential for anything other than a bit of a cold, creepy background.

It's all nicely dressed up, but in the end it doesn't have anywhere to go that we haven't been before. It certainly adds nothing to Kesey's original embodiment of the banality of evil. His commentary on the ability of humans to turn a blind eye to the most horrific situations for the sake of the preservation of themselves and the systems that they've become so comfortable perpetuating is still memorable today.

• 'Ratched' is available on Netflix.