It will come as no surprise to anyone that the centerpiece of Cat Person — an adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s viral New York short story, the literary fuse that spawned a million response articles and the sun’s surface hot ticket at Sundance — is a sex is scene. It’s inevitable, as is the fact that it’s going to be a “bad sex” scene, whether it’s a badly done sex scene or not. The only question is how awful you’ll be when the two humans connect at the center of that swirling vortex, and whether it’ll make its counterpart on the side seem comparatively tame. (The other, more pressing question is: How the heck do you even adapt Cat Person into a movie? But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.)
At this point, we followed the development of the relationship between Margot (Emilia Jones of CODA), a 20-year-old sophomore, and Robert (Nicholas Braun of Succession), a 33-year-old man. We saw them meet at work, at a food stand at the local art house theatre. You know, the kind that has a lot of revival programs and trailers about old monster movies with “a young woman in danger!!!”. Awkward flirting has led to daily text exchanges and inside jokes, as well as a nightly mission to give Margot sustenance in the form of Fruity Pebbles, the sort of gesture that falls somewhere between suspicious and cute. They finally have a real date watching The Empire Strikes Back – one of his absolute favorites; no matter that she finds Star Wars films boring – in the same theater where she works. Several beers and an extremely awful first kiss later, they’re back with Robert.
He pours Margot whiskey but doesn’t give her a chance to drink it. When they walk into his bedroom, he’s playing Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence.” (“Can’t you understand that? / Oh, my little girl.”) Robert alternates between aggressively undressing Margot and fumbling with his clothes. In the story, she imagines looking back on that moment of the worst date ever with a future boyfriend and they laugh about it; Thanks to one of the more brilliant additions that screenwriter Michelle Ashford and director Susanna Fogel bring to the table, this time Margot has a constant conversation with herself as it happens. Mission abort, says the Margot, leaning coolly against the wall. I can’t, it’s too late, Margot replies, wedged between the man who is dragging her. I could hurt his feelings. Well, let’s just get this over with, both reluctantly agree.
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What follows is a scene of such intense awkwardness and nuclear sickness that you might want to avoid ever attempting coitus again. Playing out in real-time, it’s a symphony of sexual faux pas, male heedlessness, conflicting statements, and views of consent (apparently “let’s take it slow” means manually stimulating yourself with someone else’s hand without permission ask) and barking porn scenario recreations. It ends with Margot having an out of body experience and looking down on herself while Robert treats her like a prop in Oil Derrick mode. When he’s done, he whispers, “Good girl.” It’s the opposite of physical intimacy. Rather pure nightmare fodder for bad sex.
This on-screen version of Cat Person’s second most toxic moment on the page feels like it’s going to induce nausea and give viewers at least a tiny ember to think: Does any of this sound familiar? Has an iteration of this ever happened to you? The idea is that many female viewers, and probably a handful of confident male viewers, will shy away from recognition. And like Roupenian’s story, this encounter will lead to Robert sending soulful dolphin emojis, Margot’s best friend Tamara (Geraldine Viswanathan) texting a blunt kiss on her friend’s phone, and this series of texts that gradually descend into misogyny, alter- brage and a one-word dismissal that speaks Freudian volumes: “whore.”
Fogel stages this in the now de rigueur manner of text appearing on the screen as it appears, with each incoming ring doubling as a warning signal. It doesn’t make the escalating feeling of fear any less powerful. The camera slowly moves towards the two young women as Robert’s spiraling letters pile up one after the other. Tamar’s reactions will always be OMG. Margot’s face remains a mask of emotional paralysis.
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Here the New York version ends, and as with many great short stories – “A Tree, a Stone, a Cloud”, “The Fighter”, “The Lottery” – it is the compactness and aspects of connecting the dots that define Roupenian Cat person such depth charge power. However, that final set of punches emerges just halfway through the Cat Person movie and gets to the bigger problem that plagues this whole endeavor: how to flesh this out into a three-act narrative that’s called two-act is working? hour feature film. As Fogel and Ashford told the Hollywood Reporter a few days before their glitzy Sundance premiere on Saturday night, they decided to turn this into a Get Out-style horror film with social commentary. It’s kind of Eureka! Decision that feels wise until you see the end result, at which point you might be like, Um, really?
Geraldine Viswanathan and Emilia Jones in Cat Person. Courtesy of the Sundance Institute
It’s not that Cat Person can’t be a horror story – it begins with Margaret Atwood’s quote about men afraid of humiliation and women afraid of being murdered by men, and the film taps into the inherent fear that someone would feel in a potentially dangerous situation. Like dealing with an unstable bro brother. (Braun’s size and cousin-Greg’s discomfort in his own skin become a weapon here.) The addition of spooky music playing over innocuous scenes from a date that already feels dodgy as hell fits. Ditto something as simple as Jones walking down a dark street late at night; Any number of women will tell you that this is a source of anxiety in IRL worthy of a John Carpenter rating.
But once the film embraces that notion, Cat Person begins to buck the conventions and limitations of its genre in the worst possible way. A lot of cushioning has already been crammed in to make this feature-length: Isabella Rosselini giving a lecture on queen ants, Hope Davis turning Margot’s mother into a needy narcissist, a few extra touches on campus politics, and a production of Sondheim’s Into the Woods (in which Prince Charming is problematic), imaginary therapy sessions, Viswanathan’s character arguing with someone on her Reddit known as “The Vagenda”. Not to mention incidents that are only briefly mentioned in the story, which is dramatized into full sequences.
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However, by attempting to mold this material into a ready-made horror template as well, the Cat Person mug really spills over. So we get a climax scene with a fight, a fire, and Margot going from “Concession-Stand Girl” (Robert’s demeaning nickname for her) to one last girl who couldn’t feel more forced. Worse, it seems to be based on the notion that much of the final act’s brouhaha and sense of compromised security is actually her fault – a move that seems WTF at best. These elements should add context to the culture that created these problems. Instead, it boils it all down to weak satirical tea and stick scary movie beats. Toxic masculinity may be the beast of modern men, but attempting to give it cinematic form is painfully futile.
What the film admittedly does well is the films themselves. Robert’s favorite actor is Harrison Ford, and he voices the dialogue of the Empire scene, in which Han Solo jokes with Leia before kissing her roughly. When he sends Margot a post-coital montage of Ford’s greatest hits the next day, Tamara breaks down how scenes from Indiana Jones movies and Blade Runner sell the idea that women aren’t so much courted as they are won by sheer will. The sounds of a 1950s trailer playing at Margot’s Theater about evil unleashed on damsels in distress is no coincidence. We suspect the clip of American graffiti we see isn’t normal either when a 12-year-old hangs out with an older man. Let’s not start with the song-and-dance routine Margot performs with her mom for her stepdad: Marilyn Monroe’s carnal cooing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” [shudder] from Let’s Make Love from the 1960s. It’s fair to say that Cat Person is shy about taking the medium to task to sell a romantic ideal that’s more than a little curdled. If only the source material itself was so rigorous and perceptive.