Cat Person review: Viral short story is now a ready-to-go-viral romance movie

For all of its (much-discussed) flaws, the 2017 New Yorker short story “Cat Person” got at something fundamental about sexual relationships between women and men: There’s an undercurrent of fear in everyday life for women (used broadly here, to include a variety of feminine gender expressions) that simply isn’t present for men. When someone walks behind you, cross the street. You are tempted to enter a garage while your keys are still in your hand. “Getting it over with” because you’re not sure how he’ll react if you say no. The film version of this truth shows that the truth is distorted, as with many other aspects. Pet PersonThe 2023 Sundance Film Festival premiered the movie “The Luminaries”.

Pet Person gets it wrong so consistently, makes its points so inelegantly, and pads out the short story in such an ill-conceived way that it ends up invalidating the same concerns on which it’s built. When a cop tells the protagonist that she should stop watching murder shows, it’s not institutional indifference toward violence against women. It’s a voice of reason, as the protagonist’s own actions later prove. There is both a psychotherapist that appears to be stating the subtext, but then disappears. And a friend of color who only exists to drop feminist buzzwords from five decades ago (Geraldine Viswanathan, who deserves better). It’s confident in its cluelessness, and not in a way that underlines that same quality in its 20-year-old heroine.

Margot (Emilia Jones) is a college sophomore majoring in anthropology (maybe — it’s never directly stated) who also has a part-time job at a movie theater that only plays problematic Hollywood films from the 1960s through the ’80s. That’s where she meets Robert (Nicholas Braun), an older man — she thinks he’s 25, ancient in her friends’ eyes — with whom she strikes up a flirty relationship via text. With the help of the screen on their phones, they are able to get along very well. They also have a lot of fun and banter. Robert, however, is awkward and indecisive when they meet up in person. Margot isn’t even sure if he really has the two cats he talked about in their texts.

This is the centerpiece of the both short and film versions of the story. Pet PersonMargot decides to have sex again with Robert but she accepts the experience anyway. She begins to dissociate, floating from her body and looking up at herself. It’s a silly look. He seems sillier. She agreed to go to bed with him because, in her words, “he seems like he would be grateful” for the physical connection with a hot young woman like herself. However, the attention is not validating or enjoyable. He’s a bad kisser, and a worse lover. Oh, and he’s actually 33 (knocked down a year from the story’s 34). It’s an awkward moment, but an intensely relatable one for many people.

Photo: Sundance Institute

Unfortunately, director Susanna Fogel — best known for writing Booksmart,Michelle Ashford is (Mayfair Witches) handles script duties here — brings this experience to the screen in a flat visual style. For the majority of the scene, Margot talks to a double of herself standing on the other side of the room, an externalized internal monologue that overlays comedy onto the film’s most distressing moment. But the dialogue isn’t all that funny, which makes the whole thing just fall flat.

The same goes for the film’s horror flourishes, which are bluntly inserted and summarily dismissed. This film presents the whole concept of female hyperawareness regarding men’s danger in a thoughtful and well-thought out manner. Pet PersonThe theme loses its emotion in the final stretch, which is especially shocking. None of the additions to the story really work: Like Viswanathan, Isabella Rossellini is mostly wasted as a professor who’s fond of talking about how male bees’ penises fall off during the act of copulation, disemboweling them in the process. What happens next? After This short story has a very wrong ending. Margot, without spoiling the story, has much to do with Harrison Ford.

To be fair, rolling your eyes and saying that “Star Wars is sooo boring” is something a 20-year-old would do. It’s a rite of passage to reject what came before you, even — or perhaps especially — if a guy you’re rapidly realizing isn’t as attractive as you thought makes what came before you his entire personality. The thing is, in the dynamic between Margot and Robert, it’s never clear if this is supposed to be an affectionate nod to the unearned sense of superiority inherent to 20-year-olds, or if the movie is actually rehashing Twitter discourse from the mid-to-late 2010s with a straight face. This movie plays as if it is the former.

In the past, there was no joke about men having beds frames. But culture moves very quickly in the social media age — too fast for the development, production, and release of a feature film based on a short story that’s inextricable from the online chatter around it, perhaps. SomePet Person’s observations about sex and dating are relatable, at least to those who are attracted to men: Who among us has not laid on some guy’s dirty sheets and watched a movie on a laptop after bad sex? Filmmakers are trying to control the internet to make it work for them. Pet Person It serves mostly as an example of what not do.

Pet PersonPremiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. This film is in the process of being distributed.