I have come across complaints that the studios don’t release enough horror films for what we are now obliged to call “spooky season”. Fear not (or do I mean “fear plenty”?). Here is a film about a sweet young girl who falls in with an unmistakable psychopath and allows him every opportunity to do his grisly worst.
Cousin Greg from Succession oozes menace even before – a broad signifier – he slaps his hand noisily on an escapee from his date’s ant farm. That nice girl from Coda convinces as, brighter and less trivial than her pals, a classic incarnation of the slasher-movie “final girl”. Heck, the title even reads like a singular variation on an indestructible 1942 horror masterpiece.
The problem, as fans of Kristen Roupenian’s source story will surely agree, is that Cat Person was not intended as an exercise in macabre. More particularly, the terse yarn, which became a viral sensation after its publication in the New Yorker six years ago, gains much of its power from creative ambiguity. Margot, an undergraduate, meets an older man while working at the concession stand of an arthouse cinema. (Did Rose Matafeo have the story in mind when creating the lovelier sitcom Starstruck?)
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Some red flags do go up, but we are initially unsure whether her understandable suspicions about toxic masculinity skew assessments towards the psychopathological. Maybe he’s just a bit socially clumsy. Confirmation comes with a killer last line. You get that line in the film.
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The action then continues for another 30 minutes as we drift towards a breathless finale that would cause even the creators of Victorian melodramas to fan distressed armpits. Imagine Nora slamming the door at the end of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and then returning minutes later with a shotgun to blast Torvald’s head off. It’s not much like that. But it’s just about as silly.
Cat Person managed the useful trick of not only inviting Generation Z to recognise their own discontents but also pointing their parents’ and grandparents’ generation towards alterations in gender politics. There is some surprising cultural travelogue in the film also. Of all the appalling things I feared Zoomers might get up to, listening to David Essex was not high on the list. Yet so it appears.
No great blame attaches to Emilia Jones or Nicholas Braun. Both leads do their best with a screenplay that doesn’t allow the creaks in meaning that made the story such a sensation
Much of Roupenian’s salty take on online discourse remains, but it gets drowned out by the wheezing noise as a slim source is inflated well beyond bursting point. The film is littered with excruciating foreshadowing, such as when, before Margot walks down a lonely night-time street, her stage-struck pals sing a warning lyric from Sondheim’s Into the Woods. It is always a pleasure to welcome Isabella Rossellini, but her brief turn as a teacher feels like a favour not worth bestowing.
No great blame attaches to Emilia Jones or Nicholas Braun. Both leads do their best with a screenplay that doesn’t allow the creaks in meaning that made the story such a sensation. Most viewers approaching with no prior knowledge will be baffled about where the tension is supposed to emerge from. We get the desperate sense of wishful thinking that allows the protagonist to wave away warning signs, but, in this case it’s as if Marion Crane meets Norman Bates already in his dead mother’s clothes (indeed, already holding a dripping knife). Few unaware of the film’s origins will fail to deduce that the flabby film is built around the briefest of inspirations. Is it based on a story? A song? A poem?
After all that, we gain not a whisper of the insight the epigraph from Margaret Atwood provides. “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them,” we read at the opening. “Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
Just stare at that for two hours instead. Yes, two whole hours!
Cat Person opens in cinemas on Friday, November 27th
