Thriller
Cat Person (15)
Review: Dating is a minefield and it’s impossible not to sustain injuries in a modern era of right-swipe validations, where first impressions are nurtured by stalking social media accounts and red flags are repeatedly ignored to forge in-person connections, however transitory. Kristen Roupenian’s 2017 short story Cat Person in The New Yorker perfectly distilled those concerns and her 7,000-word fiction went viral, sparking feverish debate – particularly along gender lines – about the pressures and social niceties of connecting for the first time. The story ended, memorably, with an incendiary barrage of text messages and screenwriter Michelle Ashford appropriates the same hand-typed grenades for a provocative film adaptation.
Unfortunately, the bombshell is dropped around the 90-minute mark and Ashford invents an entirely different ending that propels characters into a hoary horror thriller of dangerous obsessions with one predictable and unpalatable outcome: violence. Before Cat Person leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, director Susanna Fogel orchestrates delicious sequences including the most hilariously excruciating and relatable sex scene you’ll see all year and a gleeful, stomach-churning desecration of a rom-com staple – the first kiss. Intimacy coordinator Olivia Troy and actors Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun portray moments of vulnerability with a toe-curling realism that eludes the film’s frenzied resolution.
Twenty-year-old college student Margot (Jones) is charmingly unskilled in affairs of the heart after a break-up from her boyfriend Clay (Isaac Powell), who is fully embracing his asexuality after a brief flirtation with same-sex relationships. To help fund her anthropology studies under the imperious Dr Enid Zabala (Isabella Rossellini), Margot works behind the concessions counter of her local multiplex and she passes time by making snarky remarks about the customers via text with best friend Taylor (Geraldine Viswanathan), commenting that one patron “looks like a best friend in a Judd Apatow movie”. He turns out to be 33-year-old Robert (Braun), who asks for Margot’s number. She obliges and the pair volley pithy messages.
Margot eventually breaks Taylor’s two golden rules of texting: never message twice and always leave one text unanswered every day to assert control. When Margot and Robert meet again, his awkwardness jars with the quick-witted, “old-fashioned gentleman” he portrays online and Margot nurtures nagging concerns about the viability of a relationship. Her doubts (drolly visualised in punchy fantasy sequences) are exacerbated by a troubling incident on campus, which Margot fears may have been engineered by Robert.
Cat Person is two-thirds of a polished discourse on 21st-century courtship but the script’s extensive additions to Roupenian’s short story dull the lustre. During golden moments, Jones and Braun are a strangely believable mismatch and bold stylistic choices heighten the impact of dark humour. However, an incredulous final 30 minutes should have been neutered. This cat gets sour cream.
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Horror
Five Nights At Freddy's (15)
Review: Oversized animatronic animals treat cold-blooded murder as child’s play in a ghoulish thriller directed by Emma Tammi, based on an expansive series of horror-themed video games created by Scott Cawthon. The Five Nights At Freddy’s games cast the player as a night-time security guard at a pizza restaurant overrun by homicidal mechanised critters and each fight for survival typically ends with a jump scare to indicate one of the anthropomorphic menaces has completed a sneak attack. Fans of the interactive bloodbaths will plug narrative gaps in a script co-written by Tammi, Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback, which slavishly mines the games’ chilling lore but scrimps on emotional substance and shocks.
A protracted whodunnit involving child murders and spectral possession has an obvious outcome and lead actor Josh Hutcherson deserves a stronger character arc as reward for his on-screen athleticism to outrun a tragic childhood. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop melds cuteness and menace in fully realised animatronic characters that play a pivotal role in the restrained, sporadic slaughter (the most gruesome death is captured as shadows projected on a wall).
More than a decade after the unsolved kidnap of his younger brother, Mike Schmidt (Hutcherson) takes prescription sleeping pills each night to revisit memories of the disappearance and hopefully recall the hooded abductor’s face. He is sole guardian of a precocious 10-year-old sister, Abby (Piper Rubio), and fiercely rejects attempts by his conniving aunt Jane (Mary Stuart Masterson) to overturn the custody order. Mike must work to disprove Jane’s assertion that he isn’t fit to care for Abby. He accepts a thankless position as night-time security guard at the abandoned Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza entertainment centre. “Just keep your eyes on the monitors and keep people out. Piece of cake,” grins his career counsellor (Matthew Lillard).
Local police officer Vanessa Shelly (Elizabeth Lail) visits Mike at the centre to distil the grim history. Children went missing back in the 1980s and were never found, and Freddy’s was shut down. Rumours persist that the centre’s hulking animatronic mascots, Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie the bunny, Chica the chicken and Foxy the pirate fox, come alive after dark, possessed by ghosts of the lost tykes. When babysitter Max (Kat Conner Sterling) is indisposed, Mike is forced to take Abby with him to work and unknowingly places them both in grave danger.
Five Nights At Freddy’s is skin and bones horror, which stretches a flimsy plot to the point of translucency over skeletal remains of a conventional ghost story. Tammi orchestrates solid set pieces with impressive animatronics and repeats a torture sequence involving a Saw-style whirring face mask. If Tammi’s film was a pizza served in Freddy’s heyday, it would be meagre toppings spread thinly on a stodgy base.
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