Cat Person
STUDIOCANAL
Director Susanna Fogel follows up her underrated and often forgotten sophomore feature film – the straight-laced comedy The Spy Who Dumped Me – with the often tonally impressive and intense atmospheric venture Cat Person, based on the 2017 short story of the same name by writer Kristen Roupenian. First things first, the biggest surprise within Cat Person is twofold: that of Fogel herself and of what Cat Person is under the surface.
Starting with Fogel herself, she has so far crafted quite an underwhelming career in her directorial filmography. Beginning with the 2014 release of the Leighton Meester and Gillian Jacobs starring romantic comedy Life Partners with little to no fanfare. Four years later, her sophomore effort is crafted with the comedic duo of Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon starring in The Spy Who Dumped Me, which once again failed to light up the box office and critical response, and ultimately cornering the director in a pigeonhole of conventional genre pieces without much flair or personality on offer or seemingly on the horizon. Here-in arrives her latest feature film Cat Person, which without sounding condescending, feels as if it was created and crafted by a different director completely. It is an incredibly well-woven and well-crafted vehicle of not only a multi-stranded genre but also grapples and competently wrestles with dark, often profound modern issues of societal fears and pressures. Without letting the cat out of the bag, which will be further mentioned and alluded to below. Fogel directs the life out of this project; gone is the conventional pigeonhole of genre convention and, in its wake, Fogel crafts a multi-dimensional gripping, often profound, yet equally as haunting viewing of modern dating.
Ultimately, Cat Person on the surface labels itself in finding college student Margot – played by the terrific Emilia Jones – who begins to take a very slow developing relationship with Robert (Sucession's Nicholas Braun) but finds two people on two different very different waves lengths with grim and gripping results. As simple as that sounds within the context of the narrative, Fogel propels a tense and often excruciatingly claustrophobic mise-en-scene to infer and evoke a great deal of visceral intensity and atmosphere throughout. Sequences which are often conventionally warm in the context of a rom-com are here transfixed and remixed in harsh realities and anxiety-inducing psychological terror and horror. It is often frightening but wholeheartedly endearing not only in terms of fighting back against convention but equally as empowering in working within the horror genre as well as injecting raw power of societal and feminine woes and fear, respectively. It is this very genius elevated horror – horror fans begin to cry with that description – that works so well to involve a wider audience in the material but also fundamentally evokes a reality that for many is a day-to-day terror. This level of talent to walk the line of genre between rom-com and horror works so effectively in regards to the material but continuously furthers a sentiment of terror in watching but being unable to peel oneself away, which is a fine complement to give to work within an undeniably saturated genre. Fogel challenges and twists the tone almost in seconds on screen with the use of lighting or choice of visual framing to determine mood and elicit emotion, and then with a snap of a finger brings both the film and most importanly the audience back and forth, again resulting in a deeper engagement but also unpredictability in what’s next. If anything, it begs the question of where this has been for Fogel, with the material pre-dating her sophomore effort why the wait? Nevertheless, the wait has undoubtedly been worth it to find a genre and material in which the director has found her common ground and excels in producing.
Fogel excels in crafting a visual and tonal treat along with cinematographer Manuel Billeter and editor Jacob Craycroft working in unison with composer Heather McIntosh to consistently provoke emotive visual and audible discourse to heighten the mundane. Nevertheless. Fogel and writer Michelle Ashford are working with a talented crew in what ultimately makes this venture tick, and push to the next degree of elevation in that of performances provided all-round. Beginning with Emilia Jones, coming hot off the press in her starring turn of Academy-winning CODA, crafts an utterly compelling and warm performance in a character dipping in both naivety and sensitivity. These two types of tones are brilliantly produced not only in the form of emotional endearment but engagement in character that is soft yet inviting. It ultimately works extraordinarily well in opposing Braun's Robert in the central focused narrative but equally to that of on-screen friend Geraldine Viswanathan, who reinforces small comedic moments but also that of homage in regards to genre convention in the horror cliche of the "best friend". Sadly, Viswanathan has little to do throughout in comparison to Jones and Braun, both in presence and screen time, but what Viswanathan does provide in the sequences on-screen is entertaining engagement and emotive pauses that add much-needed self-reflection and conflict. Nevertheless, it is Braun who provides quite the intrigue in a role that is often pushed to one side - effectively to create suspense and intrigue – for the feature to develop atmospherically and tonally as well as to explore internally that of Jones' character. That being said, Braun fires his shots when given the chance in often scary intense sequences but impressively nails the smaller intimate moments of character which provide more texture and provocative arc for what is slowly brooding behind closed doors. Further acting support is limited; Isabella Rossellini turns up in one or two sequences, which provides detail and homage within the genre of horror more than anything and if provoked could take away from sequences throughout with her casting.
Nevertheless, Cat Person does come with a layer of controversy and debate. An equally similar and comparable piece of elevated material would be that of Emerald Fennell's Carey Mulligan starring Promising Young Woman in terms of showcasing profound and poignant societal fears wrapped in an attempted elevated tonal genre with lacking and poor results. Now, Fennell's film takes an incredibly haunting topic and seemingly drops the ball and central point of what it wants and is trying to achieve, Fogels' film, however, maintains its point and just about nails its central talking point in that of modern dating but furthers Roupenian's material with an unneeded and overzealous finale. Without spoiling anything, Fogel and writer Michelle Ashford craft an additional climax to the material that not only feels unneeded but if anything undermines the entires of the material itself. The greatest example is perfectly embodied in Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals, in which it painfully fades to black on the most visceral sense of brutality while watching someone's actions leave another devastated and waiting in the wings of uncertainly but acceptance, and it is that very notion in leaving its impacting theme on the audience in subtle brutality. Fogel takes the most basic, obvious and heavy-handed approach to further escalate the characters and story arcs to a point in which it painfully confirms and undermines its whole mind of the unknown and anxiousness of its entire thesis. It is a fundamentally unravelling decision that then overcomplicates, overstates, and muddies the conversation for the sake of convention without any form of sincerity and nuance. It is a decision that sadly almost ruins the entire experience because every frame before it indicates a director ahead of its audience and the genre, yet makes the most obliviously obnoxious testament to contradict those very thoughts and feelings. Made worse is that Roupenian's original material ends on the most impacting, elusive and provoking senses of unnerving sentiments imaginable, which, granted, would leave its audience cold in a sense of an ant-climatic climax but would work in justified brutality to reinforce the themes showcased but also give weight to the entire plot without even dipping its toes in perceived controversy.
All in all, this poorly conceived, narrowminded and convicted climax sours and undermines the entire experience of Cat Person that comes before it. Dissapointly so in that, Fogel's film feels so distinctly refreshing, thought-provoking and profound, so much so it is ahead of its time but can't handle its ending nor understand the impacting nature of its original thesis which is to provoke the anxiety of the world it is discussing and the ambiguous nature of being behind a screen. As it is now, Fogel's Cat Person is a feature that is flatly described as fine. It is an engrossing and engaging but flawed venture with its themes and exploration as well as the conviction of its thesis both underwhelming and flat. That being said, hope remains that with the cinematic talent and craft provided by Fogel on-screen, her next project – if fine-tuned to a better standard - will once again showcase a director with great talent and skill behind the camera.
