Female Film Critics 24/375
After Netflix’s Ratched, Sarah Paulson has become TV’s malevolent angel-of-mercy. In this new thriller, she plays a possessively controlling mother suffering from Munchausen syndrome-by-proxy. That’s a mental health issue – a form of child abuse -in which a warped caregiver causes an illness to a person under her care – like a child with a disability.
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Words cannot describe the love a mother has for her child. Her methods of nurturing, protecting and selfless sacrifice are undeniably laudable. Every day, the child is blessed to have someone who unconditionally gives them a shoulder to lean on, cry and laugh. Sadly, there is a side-effect to that love, called an unhealthy obsession.
Read moreEvery frame of Ratched communicates the off-kilter nightmare realm. The art direction, including lighting, gives an expressionistic twist to its bizarre, hermetically sealed setting. The cinematography intensifies the garish greens, antiseptic whites, shimmering blues, and rainbow of psychedelic colors, complemented by red lipstick, so bright it all but jumps off the women’s lips that look more like wounds.
Read moreServing as an origin prequel for the tyrannical nurse in Ken Kesey’s novel/ Milos Forman’s film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, this new, eight-part Netflix series, set in 1947, introduces stern, sharp-tongued Mildred Ratched (Sarah Paulson), who oozes calculating, condescending control over those she encounters.
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Anyone who has followed Paul Rudnick’s career and appreciates it knows to keep following, nuisance-close lest missing a word. The Coastal Elites outshines his every other brilliance. It expands upon what it means to manage these agonizing days with heart and soul, laughter and vinegar.
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With the help of arbitrary deadlines, handy coincidences and characters explaining comic book tropes, Shyamalan attempts a series of elaborate plot twists – of course – that he doesn’t quite pull off cleanly but that are still pretty nifty and unveil some interesting surprises. Herculean performances by McAvoy, Willis and Jackson keep “Glass” watchable even when the narrative gets murky.
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