Delayed Reaction: Cat Person

Premise: A college student begins dating a man she met at the movie theater she works at and goes through all the benchmarks of modern dating.

I missed when the New Yorker story this is based on blew up. From what I gather, the movie covers everything in the story then adds on a final act where everything goes haywire. I think that was needed for this to work as a movie, but I think it also highlights how this works best as a short story.

The most interesting thing about the movie is how much it works as a Rorschach test for the viewer. I watched this with a few friends and loved seeing how we all responded to aspects of the movie differently. As a straight male in my mid-30s, I kept trying to cut Nicolas Braun's character some slack. Others seemed to more immediately side with Emilia Jones. And we all most sided with Geraldine Viswanathan as the best friend.

One part in particular comes to mind when thinking about the complexity of this. There's the scene after the breakup when Margot (Jones) sees Robert (Braun) hanging outside the movie theater. She ends up calling the police after he leaves, which does make a kind of sense. She can feel threatened by that and why wait until it's too late to do something about it? On the other hand, I see Robert as a guy who got abruptly dumped and can't go to the movie theater he used to go to anymore. Maybe he got as far as the theater to actually see something then got paralyzed by the idea of an awkward confrontation. The idea of this movie, especially since it is only from Margot's perspective is that there's no easy way to read any situation. And that's what I liked most about the movie.

The last act does go too far and gets to a point where I can't defend any character. Instead of waffling between whose side I'm on, I just ended up on neither side, which is far less interesting to me. Then the side story with Viswanathan's internet feuds has nowhere near enough time to develop. It felt very forced in.

All that said, the movie got me thinking a lot, which means it was effective in a way many movies aren't. Emilia Jones proves that CODA was no fluke. Braun is very deft at adapting to the way the view of him in the movie continually changes. He can be charming, pathetic, and threatening in the same scene without really changing the performance in large ways.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend