It’s been a whole decade since Halloween has not had its accompanying season of American Horror Story, Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s outré horror anthology series. (The global pandemic wound up being scarier than any ghost, ghoul, or whatever that weird sex monster in Hotel was.) But just because this year’s installment of Murphy’s spooky flagship series has been sidelined doesn’t mean he can’t still bring the horror. This year his Halloween treat comes in the form of Ratched, a pseudo-origin story for the masochistic nurse in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who was immortalized by Louise Fletcher’s Oscar-winning performance in the 1975 film adaptation. If you’re looking to scratch that American Horror Story itch, Ratchet will definitely do the trick.

Ratched, which most closely resembles the Asylum season of American Horror Story, doesn’t begin with the titular character, but rather starts with a truly horrific set-piece, as a young man named Edmund (Murphy regular Finn Wittrock) viciously murders several priests in a California home. It might be jarring but it sets the tone. Soon enough Edmund is transferred to a cutting-edge psychiatric facility run by the jittery Dr. Hanover (Jon Jon Briones) and overseen by the stringent Nurse Bucket (Judy Davis). The facility is desperately trying to secure funds from the governor (Vincent D’Onofrio) and they want to make an example out of rehabilitating Edmund. It’s into this milieu that Mildred Ratched (Sarah Paulson) shows up. It turns out that she had some experience as a nurse during the war, but it turns out that her reasons for showing up to the facility are more personal than we know.

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Image via Netflix

Of course, there is a bramble of subplots and additional characters. Sharon Stone shows up a few episodes in as the vindictive mother of a young killer-turned-amputee who has unfinished business with the good doctor Hanover (it's also worth noting that she has a pet monkey that she dresses in matching outfits); Corey Stoll is a mysterious figure who rents the room next to Ratched’s at a sleazy, seaside motel; Alice Englert is a young nurse who develops feelings for Edmund; and Sophie Okonedo is a patient with multiple personalities that Hanover sees as a potential breakthrough.

But, really, this is Mildred Ratched’s story. Beautifully portrayed by Paulson, you’ll get to understand her tragic backstory (partially told, in a particularly bravura episode, through a children’s puppet theater), her conflicted sexuality (she enters into a cloak-and-dagger relationship with a closeted lesbian played by Cynthia Nixon), and how her desire to actually help people has been corrupted and perverted, leaving her as someone who is just as likely to harm as to help. Her character arc is pretty, er, big, but Paulson, having played in the Murphy sandbox for years now, is able to provide depth and texture that isn’t necessarily there in the page (or on the screen). There’s a quiet dignity to Ratched that Paulson brings, an unnerving stillness that could be a thousand different things but is likely just one, that makes each sequence she appears in bristle with unexpected possibilities.

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Image via Netflix

Unlike most of Murphy’s projects, Ratched began as a highly coveted spec script by Evan Romansky (credited here as a creator and executive producer). Murphy got involved, secured the rights to the character (both the literary and cinematic incarnations), and assembled his usual collaborators, among them writer/producer Ian Brennan, writer/producer Jennifer Salt and producer Tim Minear, to turn the feature film screenplay into a season-length show (it has already been picked up for a second season).

The resulting show, while it might have started away from him, is Murphy through-and-through, with giant, rococo sets, long tracking shots (and occasional split-screens), vibrant colors (including a lighting cue where the entire screen is flooded with color depending on a character’s emotional state), and a truly perverse amount of over-the-top violence and sex. The soundtrack is punctuated by classic cues from Hitchcock movies, Cape Fear, and during a particularly fraught sequence, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Philip Glass works wonders if you need additional intensity). Everything is wildly exaggerated and over-the-top, from the characterizations to the fetishistic attention to every aesthetic detail. Plot points and finer character beats occasionally fall away so that the show can succumb to prolonged, intricately choreographed suspense set-pieces. Ratched is so distinct that if for some reason, your Netflix was left on, the show began playing automatically, and you walked through the room, only glancing at the screen for a couple of seconds, chances are you could still identify it as a Ryan Murphy production.

Admittedly, it’s fascinating that Murphy and company are releasing a big, splashy streaming show based on one of the most notoriously evil healthcare workers ever at a time when nurses and doctors are being lionized for their bravery during the pandemic. And it will be just as fascinating to see how people respond to the show, keeping this in mind.  But taken for what the show is – a kicky, shocking, overtly stylish fever-dream of a horror thriller – Ratched works wonderfully. Every actor is dutifully committed, even if some of the characters are little more than broadly drawn cartoon characters, the stories are energetically told (even when some of the episodes are over an hour long) and the entire mood and atmosphere of the show is wholly enveloping. For something so bleak and macabre, Ratched really is a lot of fun. And at the very least it will hold you over until American Horror Story makes its blood-soaked return.

Grade: B+

Ratched premieres Friday, September 18 on Netflix.