“He looks like the best friend in a Judd Apatow movie.” That’s how Margot (Emilia Jones) describes Robert (Nicholas Braun) in a text to her best friend after first setting eyes on him, across a cinema lobby. And of course bestie Taylor (Geraldine Viswanathan), knows exactly what she means: “So… tall, dark and problematic?” comes the reply text.
The movies have a lot to answer for when it comes to modern dating. Though not quite as much as the internet. That’s where Cat Person went viral in its original incarnation, as Kristen Roupenian’s short story about a brief relationship between a college-age woman and an older man.
Roupenian’s frank, merciless descriptions of awkward sexual encounters (“…his belly thick and soft and covered with hair, Margot recoiled…”) set the timeline alight in 2017, seemingly dividing us along gender lines: Men were discomforted, even outraged at what they read. But women knew exactly what she meant.
This internet-to-movie adaptation might therefore seem like a cash-in, but happily Cat Person has more in common with 2020’s witty Twitter-thread-inspired Zola (which also featured Braun) than the smiley-face turd that is 2017’s The Emoji Movie. It retains what was effective about the original – the most cringe-inducing kiss on page is now the most cringe-inducing kiss on screen – but also deepens existing themes and develops new ones.
One of these is cinema’s own culpability in warping romantic expectations. The casting of Succession’s lolloping Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) as Harrison Ford-obsessed film-bro Robert works as a comment on life’s supposedly unthreatening, self-described ‘nice guys’, but direction from Booksmart co-writer Susanna Fogel and Michelle Ashford’s astute script don’t let young women off the hook either.
Margot’s habit of projecting non-existent depths onto thoroughly average guys is entertainingly mocked, while an older generation of women are invited into the conversation, via enjoyably odd cameos from Hope Davis and Isabella Rossellini.
Much of this is blackly comic. Cat Person knows that women’s compulsion to appease men, and men’s sense of entitlement to women’s attention can be very funny. Often right up until the point it turns deadly. Even some erratic tonal changes in the film’s final third ring true in this context.
Being a woman who dates men means never knowing whether this moonlit scene will be the opening for a sweet rom-com, or a terrifying true-crime thriller.
