Review: Cat Person proves intriguingly uncomfortable on the big screen

Cat Person offers a compelling and yet oddly uncomfortable couple of hours – presumably exactly as it intends to.

Massively expanded from a New Yorker short story from six years ago, it’s the tale of college student Margot (Emilia Jones) who knowingly leads on a bizarre and creepy older guy – Robert (Nicholas Braun) – she meets at the cinema where she works part time. And then when she drops him, she really can’t fathom why he apparently takes it so badly. The idea behind it all, you have to conclude, is a meditation on the riskiness of modern dating in an era where, perhaps even more than ever, people are so unknowable, particularly when you throw text banter into the mix.

Jones is excellent as the 20-year-old who finds herself oddly drawn to the oddball, a guy who mouths along the words to The Empire Strikes Back and actually finds it funny; a guy who claims to have cats which are oddly absent when he takes her back to his place; a guy who reveals absolutely nothing about his circumstances – perhaps largely because Margot never seems to want to ask him. So yes, he’s creepy and certainly strange – but in fairness to him, he never seeks to hide it, and it’s Margot who does all the running when it comes to getting into bed with him. First comes the kissing which she describes as a total mauling; and yet still she seems to find something bizarrely magnetic about him. That magnetism, however, totally disappears once she has lured him between his own sheets. His sheer oddness, self-absorption and animalistic love-making send her scurrying home in a state – and who can blame her.

Except this is a film where blame – and there is a lot of it – is hugely difficult to apportion. Margot is the kind of girl who constantly projects the worst. One of the tricks of the film is that we often see disaster unfurling only for a quick rewind to show us that what we took for real was actually unfolding only in her head. And so you start to wonder at the extent of Robert’s culpability. OK, he sends foul texts after she has dropped him – and there is no excuse for that. And yet you can start to understand it. It’s a great performance from Nicholas Braun, rather unnervingly Nicolas Cage-like in voice. The strangeness is abundantly clear, but who knows – perhaps he really is harmlessly strange… unless provoked. You just keep on watching… And that’s what keeps you on edge, what drives the tension as it all threatens to escalate and duly does so, thriller turning to horror.

In the background Margot has got the stock irritating best mate (Taylor played by Geraldine Viswanathan) desperate to protect her; but she’s also got a bizarre mum and step-dad who between them have clearly left her ill-equipped for the kind of relationship she thinks she’s embarking on, quite apart from all Robert’s oddities. The result is intriguing and well paced – and maybe best of all, that best kind of film, one which will leave you pondering for ages what on earth you actually make of it.