Review: ‘Cat Person’ is an adaptation that’s grouchy, wet and declawed. (You’ll do the hissing)

When author Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” appeared in the New Yorker nearly six years ago, its compelling depiction of a sweet flirtation turned sour date between 20-year-old narrator Margot and 34-year-old Robert sparked a viral, vibrating national conversation over micro-discomforts and macro-delusions, from social media masks and body issues to unprobed privilege and toxic masculinity.

Short fiction in an upscale magazine doesn’t usually reach the meme-ing, posting zeitgeist, but this one was snappy about modern life, psychologically acute and tartly sad, as if provoking I-feel-seen nods and how-appalling headshakes were the idea. Readers individualizing their takeaways is always a culturally fascinating phenomenon, unless you’re talking about the harshly elaborate, genre-ified mess made of “Cat Person” by director Susanna Fogel and screenwriter Michelle Ashford, in which case what was delicately contoured and squeamishly human about Roupenian’s source material has been shrouded by a garish face-filter app.

The core tale is still there. College student Margot (Emilia Jones of “CODA”), a part-time concession-stand employee, starts a bantery text relationship with awkwardly attentive movie patron Robert (Nicholas Braun) that triggers her desire for something distracting and fun; at the same time she worries whether she’s making the wrong choice with a random dude. (Margaret Atwood’s notorious assessment of men’s and women’s dating fears is this movie’s opening text quote, incidentally, which feels like both an unnecessary spoiler, and a slight to the author whose tale is about to be dramatized.)

Nevertheless, the pair meet up and a night of hesitant signals and well-intentioned gestures across a movie and drinks devolves into a mismatch of experiences at his lonely-guy pad. As in the short story, Margot’s perspective is the driver as she navigates a swirl of romantic hope, vulnerability and accommodation that eventually curdles into distaste. Robert’s motivations, meanwhile, seem pitifully readable, until we realize his hurt feelings carry a disturbing edge.

Geraldine Viswanathan, left, and Emilia Jones in the movie “Cat Person.”

(Rialto Pictures / StudioCanal)

Much has been made since the adaptation’s premiere at Sundance of the filmmakers’ controversial decision to push past Roupenian’s perfectly chilling end and send the whole thing off a narrative cliff. But the reality is that the movie is already in free fall by the time its feverish extra half-hour of blood, screaming and fire kicks in. If anything, the new stuff’s brazenness is truer in tone to what this “Cat Person” clearly wants to be: a slick, snarky, pulverizing horror-comedy rather than the compressed, low-key Mary Gaitskill-meets-Eliza Hittman cringefest that Roupenian’s delicate storytelling conjured with every peek into Margot’s drifting psyche.

Books

How the viral story ‘Cat Person’ became a movie that goes off the rails — in a good way

Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story, ‘Cat Person,’ is now a feature film with a wildly different ending. It’s sure to be just as polarizing, but it works.

Oct. 5, 2023

The augmenting and metaphor-stapling starts early and none of it lands. Flashes of Margot’s worst-scenario imaginings seem ripped from cheesy fright flicks. The college milieu padding with annoying musical theater friends and gender-politics jokes feels sitcom-grade, especially the way the consequential friend from the story, played here by Geraldine Viswanathan, has been conceived. And while it may be sacrilege to call Isabella Rossellini and Hope Davis superfluous, as an anthropology professor and a flamboyant mother, respectively, they are. Was a two-hour running time a contractual obligation?

The leads are well-cast, but Jones and Braun are ultimately figurines more than they are layered characters. Their skills — her easy intelligence and his Greg-from-“Succession”-adjacent haplessness — are occasionally discernible when things slow down and they get to act like people sharing a space, or, as the story so memorably outlined, not sharing one. But with all the quirky needle drops substituting for real mood, and the flippant dialogue spelling everything out for us, this “Cat Person” proves as susceptible to misreading the vibe as its crossed-wires characters. Ill-considered hookups aren’t only between humans.