Cat Person — the movie adaptation of the New Yorker short story that took over your Twitter feed in December 2017 — starts with a now-familiar paraphrase of a Margaret Atwood quotation: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them,” says the on-screen text. “Women are afraid that men will kill them.”
The crowd laughed nervously when the words appeared at Cat Person’s Sundance premiere in January of this year. It’s a solid précis for the film, which chronicles the doomed relationship of 20-year-old Margot (Emilia Jones) and a very tall guy named Robert (Nicholas Braun). They meet at the movie theater where she works behind the concession counter. They have a bracing and thrilling text message relationship, followed by a far less scintillating in-person one, and then it all goes south.
The movie is good, till it isn’t; director Susanna Fogel deftly pushes Margot’s interior narrative into a visual medium by adding secondary characters (like best friend Taylor, played by the always fantastic Geraldine Viswanathan), cleverly deploying dream sequences, and rendering Margot’s squirmy experience with visceral precision. But there’s a third act tacked on that destroys the ambiguity of the original story. In the short story, we’re left with lots of questions, the way you would at the end of such a relationship. But the film tries to tie the loose ends up, and the result is maddening.
Still, I mostly enjoyed it. And the Atwood paraphrase kept churning in the back of my mind, because I started ticking off the other films I’d just seen at Sundance that could have claimed it as well. There’s a particular type of “good guy” who breaks into an incandescent rage when his ego is bruised — when he suspects, in other words, that women are laughing…
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