A fascinating study on mental illness above all else, "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" offers a disturbingly piercing and complex glimpse into one's mind and of what exactly constitutes a psychological disease. Everyone knows about Nicholson's charismatic turn as McMurphy, the supposedly sanest person in the asylum but there's so much more here if one digs beneath the surface and straight into the secondary characters. Where Brad Dourif excels as the impossibly sensitive and introverted youth unable to take a stand on anything. Besides him we get all sorts of disturbed conditions ranging from people who frequent the asylum as refuge from their lives to others who are utterly unable to deal with the world in the most basic of ways. So while taking this as the saga of one man while he struggles to remain sane is affecting enough, couple it with the myriad shades of humanity that surround and interact with him and the end result is a thoroughly envolving experience.
