Cat Per­son review – sor­ry, I’m allergic

If you were on the inter­net in 2017, you prob­a­bly knew about Cat Per­son. The New York­er short sto­ry by Kris­ten Roupen­ian set the inter­net ablaze, praised for its sear­ing insight into het­ero­sex­u­al pow­er dynam­ics, age gaps and the per­ils of mod­ern dat­ing. Nat­u­ral­ly, the sto­ry was swift­ly optioned to be turned into a screen­play, writ­ten by vet­er­an screen­writer Michelle Ash­ford and direct­ed by Susan­na Fogel of The Spy Who Dumped Me Fame.

While it’s pos­si­ble to tease out a fea­ture-length project from a short sto­ry (recent shin­ing exam­ples being After Yang and Burn­ing) it’s often an uphill bat­tle; what might work as a short, sharp shock in prose doesn’t always trans­late onto screen. In the case of Cat Per­son, the brevi­ty of the source mate­r­i­al is thin­ly stretched into a two-hour run­time, padded out with tedious sub­plots and a new, excru­ci­at­ing end­ing which under­mines the ini­tial point of its creation.

Emil­ia Jones and Nicholas Braun are poor­ly cast as 20-year-old Mar­got and 33-year-old Robert, who meet at the movie the­atre where she works after he buys pop­corn from her. While Jones and Emil­ia are, in fact, those ages in real life, this dis­par­i­ty doesn’t trans­late on-screen. Braun is twitchy and awk­ward, lack­ing the inten­si­ty of his novel­la coun­ter­part, while Jones fails to cap­ture the naïveté which the nar­ra­tive depends upon. For her, pur­su­ing a roman­tic rela­tion­ship with Robert is more of a social exper­i­ment, as she engages in con­ver­sa­tions with her female friends about fem­i­nism and rolls her eyes at her over­bear­ing, extreme­ly wealthy moth­er and stepfather.

Robert is less a char­ac­ter so much as a Twit­ter par­o­dy brought to life. He’s a movie bro who mansplains Indi­ana Jones to his Gen Z not-girl­friend and con­sid­ers Depeche Mode bed­room mood music. It’s not that men like this don’t exist, but rather, what does this film have to say about them that count­less Tweets and Tik­Toks haven’t already observed? There’s no indi­ca­tion as to what Mar­got sees in Robert, aside from exchang­ing ​‘wit­ty’ repar­tee over text. When they first go on a date, she sus­pects him of lock­ing them in a cup­board in the sci­ence lab at her col­lege. It feels as though Mar­got is repeat­ed­ly ignor­ing alarm bells, although it’s not clear why.

Margot’s mind fre­quent­ly gives way to night­mar­ish visions – she sees her dorm mate attacked by a stray dog, she pic­tures Robert assault­ing her – and while this could be an attempt to address the ways in which women are social­ly con­di­tioned to spot dan­ger before it hap­pens and see all men as poten­tial threats, the film has no inter­est in unpack­ing the per­son­al ram­i­fi­ca­tions of this, or indeed the pow­er imbal­ance which made the source mate­r­i­al inter­est­ing. In fact, the film’s atro­cious third act seems to prove Mar­got was right to be sus­pi­cious all along, and the film descends into a rote hor­ror for the last 15 minutes.

This lack of ideas is rein­forced by a dizzy­ing num­ber of pop songs used to under­score what’s hap­pen­ing on screen, cre­at­ing the sense that the cre­ative team reached for famil­iar ref­er­ences when they lacked a devel­oped nar­ra­tive. Quirky meta flour­ish­es – such as Mar­got talk­ing to a dis­ap­point­ed ver­sion of her­self dur­ing a sex­u­al encounter with Robert, and a hard cut to Robert dis­cussing a moment with Mar­got in a ther­a­py ses­sion as though it’s a scene from a film – are per­haps intend­ed to cre­ate a lit­tle lev­i­ty, but only under­score the film’s iden­ti­ty cri­sis and lack of under­stand­ing about where fem­i­nism is in pop cul­ture by this point.

Since its release, Cat Per­son has attract­ed con­tro­ver­sy as the woman who appar­ent­ly unknow­ing­ly inspired the sto­ry spoke out about Roupen­ian and con­firmed the man on whom Robert was based had passed away since the sto­ry was writ­ten. It feels as though the sto­ry of Cat Per­son itself is now more inter­est­ing than the con­tent that was pub­lished in the New York­er – at least, it’s cer­tain­ly much more com­pelling than this self-sat­is­fied, baf­fling­ly staged adaptation.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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