Cat Person review: Bad kitty
Brevity is the soul of many things, arguably, but it is pretty much non-negotiable in a short story. And so it was that in a few impactful pages, Kristen Roupenian's brutally succinct "Cat Person," published in The New Yorker in late 2017, managed to become the kind of viral phenomenon mostly confined these days to messy awards-show moments or TikTok memes about corn.
It's not surprising that a filmmaker would attempt to grab that zeitgeist tiger by the tail, or even painstakingly expand it to reflect the shifting mores and social codes of 2023. What's disappointing is how lost this Cat, which premiered last night at the Sundance Film Festival, seems to get along the way: a lean and potent exploration of modern dating padded out into a strenuously self-aware dramedy that flips to half-cocked, wildly improbable thriller in the (wholly invented) third act.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
CODA star Emilia Jones is Margot, a 20-year-old sophomore in some ordinary, unspecified college town who spends her days in the paleontology lab and several evenings a week working behind the candy counter at the local movie house. When a diffident giraffe of a man named Robert (Succession's Nicholas Braun) comes in one night, she teases him about his order (large popcorn, Red Vines) and a small, sweet flirtation begins.
He's clearly at least a few years out of school, but their text banter zips and zings, and she starts to live for the metallic chime of a new-message notification. Real-world romance, though, proves harder to negotiate: In person, their interactions have a fraught edge that belie the easy back-and-forth of their online personalities. Does Robert like her at all? Does he actually even have any cats? Margot debates with her wide-eyed dorm-mates and her best friend, a cheerfully strident fourth-wave feminist with — of course — a niche subreddit (Hala's breezy, acerbic Geraldine Viswanathan).
Nevertheless, she persists, for reasons that have as much to do with vanity, anxiety, and the strange square dance of gender roles as they do with physical attraction, or the lack of it. And when a sexual encounter at Robert's house reveals the extent of their disconnect, the movie shifts again, sailing quickly past the story's final, perfect line with more than a half an hour still to burn on screen.
It's hard to say how viewers who come to Cat Person without having read the source material will react to the liberties that director Susanna Fogel (who made 2019's enjoyably daffy The Spy Who Dumped Me) and screenwriter Michelle Ashford (Masters of Sex) take with the text; maybe they'll think it's a just-fine thriller with an inexplicable end. But even the presence of supporting players like Viswanathan, Isabella Rossellini, and a criminally underused Hope Davis can't make sense of too many of the odd choices the movie makes, down to the casting of its leads.
As two flawed but essentially adorable people struggling to understand the semaphores of human interaction, Jones and Braun are both relatable in a way that only professionally charismatic actors can be — though it's not clear that Braun, particularly, should be. The entire intent of the character is flipped by his mere presence in the role, and a script that seems either unwilling or unable to allow him any real unlikability, beyond one genuinely excruciating sex scene.
When he becomes someone else, so does she, necessarily, upending the original story's taut lessons and careful world-building in bizarrely literal ways. By swerving into territory already better owned by outrageous indies like Promising Young Woman — and to a lesser degree, last year's Sundance breakout Fresh — Cat forfeits its own underlying message, without finding anything else new or even particularly coherent to say. What's left is just another "Lol isn't dating crazy?" hot take, fattened and declawed. Grade: C+
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