Cat Person review: Viral short story is now a ready-to-go-viral romance movie

For all of its (much-discussed) flaws, the 2017 New Yorker quick story “Cat Particular person” obtained at one thing basic about sexual relationships between ladies and men: There’s an undercurrent of worry in on a regular basis life for girls (used broadly right here, to incorporate quite a lot of female gender expressions) that merely isn’t current for males. Crossing the road when somebody is strolling behind you. Going right into a parking storage with keys clutched in your fist. “Getting it over with” since you’re undecided how he’ll react when you say no. This reality is botched, like so many different issues, within the movie model of Cat Particular person, which premiered this week on the 2023 Sundance Movie Competition.

Cat Particular person will get it mistaken so persistently, makes its factors so inelegantly, and pads out the quick story in such an ill-conceived method that it finally ends up invalidating the identical issues on which it’s constructed. When a cop tells the protagonist that she ought to cease watching homicide reveals, it’s not institutional indifference towards violence towards ladies. It’s a voice of cause, because the protagonist’s personal actions later show. This can be a movie that features each a therapist who seems to state the subtext as textual content, then vanishes, and a one-dimensional finest buddy of shade who exists solely to drop feminist buzzwords from 5 years in the past (Geraldine Viswanathan, who deserves higher). It’s assured in its cluelessness, and never in a method that underlines that very same high quality in its 20-year-old heroine.

Margot (Emilia Jones) is a university sophomore majoring in anthropology (perhaps — it’s by no means straight said) who additionally has a part-time job at a movie show that solely performs problematic Hollywood movies from the Sixties by way of the ’80s. That’s the place she meets Robert (Nicholas Braun), an older man — she thinks he’s 25, historic in her mates’ eyes — with whom she strikes up a flirty relationship by way of textual content. They get alongside fantastically with the telephone display screen as a mediator; he offers good banter, one would possibly say. However after they lastly meet in actual life, Robert is awkward and evasive. Margot isn’t even certain if he actually has the 2 cats he talked about of their texts.

The centerpiece of each the quick story and the movie model of Cat Particular person is a scene the place Margot modifications her thoughts about having intercourse with Robert, however goes together with the encounter anyway. She dissociates, floating out of her physique and viewing herself from above. She seems to be foolish. He seems to be sillier. She agreed to go to mattress with him as a result of, in her phrases, “he looks like he could be grateful” for the bodily reference to a sizzling younger lady like herself. However now the eye is neither validating nor fulfilling. He’s a nasty kisser, and a worse lover. Oh, and he’s truly 33 (knocked down a yr from the story’s 34). It’s an ungainly second, however an intensely relatable one for many individuals.

Photograph: Sundance Institute

Sadly, director Susanna Fogel — finest identified for writing Booksmart, though Michelle Ashford (Mayfair Witches) handles script duties right here — brings this expertise to the display screen in a flat visible model. For almost all of the scene, Margot talks to a double of herself standing on the opposite facet of the room, an externalized inside monologue that overlays comedy onto the movie’s most distressing second. However the dialogue isn’t all that humorous, which makes the entire thing simply fall flat.

The identical goes for the movie’s horror prospers, that are bluntly inserted and summarily dismissed. The whole idea of feminine hyperawareness in regards to the hazard posed by males is offered in such a studied method in Cat Particular person that it finally ends up draining all of the emotion from the theme, notably in its mind-boggling closing stretch. Not one of the additions to the story actually work: Like Viswanathan, Isabella Rossellini is generally wasted as a professor who’s keen on speaking about how male bees’ penises fall off throughout the act of copulation, disemboweling them within the course of. And what occurs within the film after the quick story ends is very misguided. With out spoiling, Margot has fairly an ax to grind with Harrison Ford.

To be honest, rolling your eyes and saying that “Star Wars is sooo boring” is one thing a 20-year-old would do. It’s a ceremony of passage to reject what got here earlier than you, even — or maybe particularly — if a man you’re quickly realizing isn’t as enticing as you thought makes what got here earlier than you his whole character. The factor is, within the dynamic between Margot and Robert, it’s by no means clear if that is speculated to be an affectionate nod to the unearned sense of superiority inherent to 20-year-olds, or if the film is definitely rehashing Twitter discourse from the mid-to-late 2010s with a straight face. It performs just like the latter.

There was a time when a crack about males not having mattress frames was contemporary. However tradition strikes in a short time within the social media age — too quick for the event, manufacturing, and launch of a characteristic movie primarily based on a brief story that’s inextricable from the net chatter round it, maybe. A few of Cat Particular person’s observations about intercourse and relationship are relatable, a minimum of to those that are drawn to males: Who amongst us has not laid on some man’s soiled sheets and watched a film on a laptop computer after unhealthy intercourse? However as filmmakers strive to determine methods to lasso the web and tame it for the display screen, Cat Particular person is generally helpful as a lesson in what to not do.

Cat Particular person premiered on the 2023 Sundance Movie Competition. The movie is presently looking for distribution for launch.