The Atlantic
I Care A Lot
The Netflix neo-noir isn’t just about a merciless scammer; it’s about the broken bureaucracies that enable her abuse.
Seacia Pavao / Netflix
Psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes, and other long-term-care facilities have served as chilling backdrops to some of film’s most arresting psychological thrillers. But the foreboding lighthouse of
Shutter Island and the macabre, labyrinthine hospital of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest pale in comparison with both movies’ animating horrors: the wretched treatment of the people trapped within. These works dramatize the cruelties that hospital administrators and caretakers exact upon their patients, especially those who have been admitted against their will, with Hitchcockian dread. In doing so, they challenge conventional wisdom about mental illness, authority, and the ethics of condemning people to isolation.