CAT PERSON - Mark Reviews Movies

Cat Person, Rialto Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 12, 2023

Does Cat Person, a story of dating in the modern age, need to go where its story ultimately goes? In some ways, it's easy enough to understand the impulses of Michelle Ashford's screenplay, which transforms conflicting thoughts, desires, and needs into an external conflict between the two characters involved. What happens here very well could—and likely does—happen in reality, although the sudden escalation of the conflict in the climax is so over-the-top that it's difficult to justify it as anything convincing.

The third act alone isn't the problem, though, but it does help us to understand how and why this story, with intentions that seem to be reaching for some generous understanding of both of its main characters, never pulls off its assorted tricks. The script and filmmaking attempt to make everything literal and on the surface, instead of just letting us get to know these characters and see how things go wrong in everyday ways.

It's not enough, for example, that college-aged Margot (Emilia Jones) has uncertainty about the older Robert (Nicholas Braun), whom she meets while working at a movie theater near her college campus. All of those thoughts have to be communicated in a scene that's akin to an out-of-body experience, with Margot's doubts and conscience being personified on screen.

It's not enough that the two eventually come to an impasse in a potential romantic relationship. That stalemate, which results in anger on one side and fear on the other, has to become more and bigger. That means the tale becomes a horror story of sorts, with a shadowy figure haunting Margot's routine and sinister noises signaling that she might be in danger, before it becomes an out-and-out thriller, complete with a final showdown.

All of this seems to run counter to the movie's early and even later efforts to inject a level of humanity into its depiction of contemporary dating, which here is presented as something quite impersonal. Much that has to do with technology, since Margot and Robert, after some small talk with a counter between them, start a text-based relationship over their cellphones.

One of the early miscalculations of Susanna Fogel's movie is how much of this relationship is developed by way of text on small screens or blown up to fit a section of the movie's own frame. The plot here comes from a short story by Kristen Roupenian, and that should pretty much explain the issue as an error of translating between mediums. There's very little that's cinematic about reading blocks of text, but it is, well, exactly what literature is.

The story, then, is about how Margot and Robert present versions of themselves by way of these text messages, the limits of those self-portrayals, and the ease of misunderstanding another or falsely representing oneself in that kind of communication. Margot is convinced that Robert is a sweet and funny guy, because his texts can be so sweet and funny, but whenever they hang out in person, she finds him to be, well, kind of dull.

As for Robert's perspective of Margot, that becomes important later, and the movie's attempt to try to make us see both sides of this miscommunication collapses. It's partly because Robert's point of view is barely hinted at until much later, but it's mostly because of the extreme imbalance between how these character react when things go sideways. The whole attempt feels dishonest.

That's too bad, because the focus on some shared trait between these two characters is somewhat fascinating. They're both insecure: Margot because a former boyfriend back home tells her he has discovered he's asexual and Robert, apparently, because he is older and single at a point in his life when he think he shouldn't be.

Like Margot, we can only suspect what's going on with Robert, and the filmmakers let us know we should be wondering about the guy by playing out Margot's imagination in front of us—of Robert working assorted jobs, of him and her going to therapy to discuss the awkward start of their relationship, of him having a torture dungeon in his home. It's tough to determine if the movie trusts its characters or us less in such on-the-nose moments, and that's not even mentioning Margot's feminist friend Taylor (Geraldine Viswanathan), who makes some good points about patterns of behavior from both her pal and Robert, only to receive a final character beat that tries to force the movie's fence-sitting position upon her.

It's not that Cat Person doesn't possess a perspective. It is, though, that the narrative's perspective is too restricted to accomplish what it's attempting, and the result is a thematic fight that's only slightly less uncomfortable than the literal one in the third act.

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