Cat Person

A thought-provoking and hotly debated New Yorker short story turned thought-provoking and I’m sure to-be hotly debated movie: Cat Person is the latest treatise on modern dating.

Straight up, this is not as essential as Promising Young Woman which remains the high watermark this strives to reach. Cat Person suffers a little for trying to be everything at once but there’s a lot to like, enjoy and think about here.

The first half actually adapts the text well. The short story is well written and perfectly concise for its purpose but the film takes the changing emotions, the hesitancy, the fluctuations between reality and possibility and articulates them in very clever ways.

20-year-old college student Margot meets mysterious, older stranger Robert and the two forge an initial romance over text. In reality, his interactions are stranger and less easily interpreted and Margot is increasingly suspicious of him as a person.

The film depiction tows a really nice line between romance and horror, switching a pleasant scene on a sixpence. This is helped no end by the score, with some excellent needle-drops and scary strings. We flip flop with Margot as her feelings towards Robert morph and the film uses some ingenious ways to get us into her psyche.

The nature of it being a short story, however, is where things get a little contentious. Without spoiling anything, the written piece ends with a definitive answer as to what type of character Robert really is. Here, that scene comes somewhere in the middle, with a third act denouement coming completely out of leftfield, nigh on bludgeoning the viewer in the face with increasingly unlikely developments and just falling too far away from the message it's trying to convey.

It half works, but loses the subtlety and nuances of the female experience we vicariously live through across the first part of the film. It also feels a tiny bit unedited, with a few lost story threads and holes popping up that could have easily been rectified.

By veering too far into horror/thriller territory, Cat Person loses its chance to sit at the top table with the aforementioned Promising Young Woman as a new-school relationship study and an effective ‘message movie’. It gets a lot right though and is a solid and enjoyable watch that just veers too far off track.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️