PARK CITY, Utah — Late into "Cat Person," the much-buzzed-about new movie adapted from Kristen Roupenian's 2017 short story of the same title, an ugly one-word text message appears in startling, screen-filling closeup. You'll know what the word is if you've read the story, and there's a decent chance you have, since it is one of the more widely circulated and ferociously debated fiction pieces published by the New Yorker in recent memory.
Still, to judge by the gasps that greeted that word at the movie's Sundance Film Festival premiere Saturday night, there were clearly many in the audience who hadn't. Presumably they were also unaware that the word is also the very last word of Roupenian's story, which, unlike the movie, does not proceed to devolve into a bloody, fiery and spectacularly violent mess.
Don't worry, I haven't just ruined "Cat Person" for you. In some ways it would be fitting if I did, since the movie, directed by Susanna Fogel ("The Spy Who Dumped Me") from a script by Michelle Ashford, more or less ruins the story. I'm not a purist when it comes to adaptations; my general rule of thumb is that the more irreverent liberties a movie takes with its source material, the better. But there is nothing better about this "Cat Person," which coarsens, flattens and torturously over-elaborates a story whose elegant concision was precisely what made it such rich and elastic interpretive fodder.
