Worth: $9.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Emilia Jones, Nicholas Braun, Geraldine Viswanathan, Hope Davis, Fred Melamed, Liza Koshy, Michael Gandolfini, Isabella Rossellini
Intro:
…. what is said not only lacks any real bite but is supplemented with wishy-washy backtracking that makes it seem like the filmmakers were scared to make the audience feel confronted… and so made it uncomfortable in a completely different way.
After the swing-and-a-miss of The Spy Who Dumped Me, director Susanna Fogel has gone for something a bit different for her next feature. Something more psychologically charged that delves into darker subject matter regarding modern dating, gender divides, and how media can warp our social and sexual expectations.
Adapted from the 2017 New Yorker short story of the same name, Cat Person certainly gets a lot of the smaller details dead-on. Watching Margot (Emilia Jones) and her increasingly uncomfortable relationship with Robert (Nicholas Braun) hits a similar note to early scenes in Barbarian in its evocation of casual conversation red flags. It creates tangible discomfort and taps into what helped the source material go viral back in the day: awkward and worrying behaviour that is eerily recognisable.
Shame that it isn’t able to maintain that level of genuine engagement for long, or even consistently. Fogel struggles with tone, with a premise and presentation that try to bring out the intimidated position of women as if they are living in a horror movie (punctuated by a Margaret Atwood quote that ends up being more salient than anything to follow) but shows a general lack of conviction in what it has to say. It aims for Promising Young Woman, but is not forthright enough in its observations.
If anything, Cat Person seems far too eager to go full squishy centrist, arguing that ‘both sides’ need to learn something, so that we can all avoid toxic behaviour. Once it gets past the material from the original short story and into the tumultuous third act, it devolves into half-hearted arguments about the expectations engendered in both men and women, but only ends up turning what should be a relatable thriller into a narrative gaslighting experiment to show how them wems be crazy. It winds up cheapening both its subject matter and the otherwise-accurate statements it made beforehand by undercutting any tension with misplaced jokes and unnecessary subplots (Reddit??!).
While we’re on about things that were thrown into this without much forethought, why is Isabella Rossellini being wasted in this? Was someone desperately hoping for more Green Porno installments, and so decided to shoe-horn in both her and an ill-explained ant metaphor just to make it happen? If there was less extraneous fluff like that and more of the properly thought-out content, the film may have actually worked.
But instead, Cat Person comes across as a lame Pick-Me amidst so many better feminist films. When put against the likes of Barbarian or PYW or Barbie or even Alex Garland’s Men, what is said not only lacks any real bite but is supplemented with wishy-washy backtracking that makes it seem like the filmmakers were scared to make the audience feel confronted… and so made it uncomfortable in a completely different way. It has its moments of well-earned cringe, but a few choice words does not a coherent sentence make.
