Margaret Atwood said it best: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” This age-old discrepancy in the way the two genders experience the world is written both at the initial frame and very heart of Susanna Fogel’s mercurial “Cat Person,” a fiendishly playful relationship-gone-bad quasi-thriller with a sense of humor about its own unknowability. The two parties (who are barely in a relationship) are a beautiful, inquisitive 20-year-old college student testing the limits of her own sexual powers and a painfully average thirtysomething guy dying to impress her via clueless means. So what happens when the former realizes he isn’t what she wants, abruptly pulls away, and bruises the latter’s male ego?
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A grim image would come to mind in stories a lot darker than that of “Cat Person.” But Fogel’s mischievous outing (written by “Masters of Sex” developer Michelle Ashford) is neither the satirical “Fresh” with flesh-eating boyfriends nor a hellish slasher. It is instead a knotty interrogation of gender dynamics without obvious villains, one that sometimes feels searching and convoluted to a fault.
Then again, perhaps the source material itself — Kristen Roupenian’s 2017 short story published in The New Yorker — demands this kind of obscurity in a screen adaptation. Not that this fortysomething female critic found Roupenian’s pitting of a curious young woman against the fragile self-esteem of an unremarkable man particularly complex. I have been that age. In our 20s, we aren’t exactly encouraged to say what we really want, if we even know it ourselves, that is. There is too much pressure, embarrassment, or conflict around articulating, “Yes, I like that” or “No, that’s not working for me.”
And inexperienced men (at least heterosexual ones) aren’t exactly bothered to doubt anything that they’re doing in bed because they’ve rarely been confronted before. But for better or worse, “Cat Person” became a viral sensation at the time and entered The Zeitgeist, instigating endless takes and debates about who’s right, who’s wrong, and whose experience of the events is more legitimate. So in a way, Ashford and Fogel jointly justify the time we spent looking for answers in Roupenian’s nimble paragraphs, giving them a deepened life with turns that are sometimes wildly fascinating, sometimes over-labored.
The basic idea is the same. Portrayed by “CODA” star Emilia Jones with a frisky bite, Margot works at an artsy movie theater at the concessions counter. A regular patron of the joint is Robert, played superbly by Nicholas Braun of “Succession” with a studious self-consciousness, so much that he even wears his uncommon height with deliberate discomfort. Seduced by her own projections of who this decent-looking guy might be, Margot clumsily ushers in a conversation that falls flat. But the awkward Robert eventually asks for her number, with the two embarking on an elongated text-based flirtation that’s intriguing, even romantic in its chemistry. Margot’s cynical best friend Taylor (the great Geraldine Viswanathan)—a barely mentioned personality in the story, but a major presence here—meanwhile warns her against the perils of this entanglement she finds shady, being a fierce, extremely online feminist rightfully skeptical of men. But one grotesquely awful (and hilariously rendered) kiss and various terrible attempts made at an actual date later, Margot and Robert finally go to bed.
Robert might not be that bad a guy. In fact, with every gentle kiss he lands on Margot’s forehead and dated gesture he attempts, he truly believes he is one of the good ones. Still, what bad kisser has ever been unselfishly good between the bedsheets? To the grossed-out Margot’s horror, the sex ends up being so bad, so pathetically porn-like, that she fakes pleasure in order to wrap it up quickly. And because she regrets the sex immediately, Margo uneasily ghosts the confused guy, managing to cut ties with him only when the increasingly impatient Taylor steps in.
Those who have read the short story already know how the ordeal ends. After briefly acting like a mature person who can accept rejection, Robert floods Margot’s phone with unwelcome texts one day, ending them with a most dreadful word: “Whore.” Ashford’s script is smart in the ways it expands on these two acts, making Margot’s internal battles a major part of the plot. As a young woman with a confident swagger and enviable looks, Margot wonders about the effect her beauty must-have on Robert, considering the sway she’d feel out of sparking a helpless desire in him. Possessed by the idea of such dominance over an older man with evidently little experience with women, Margot gets drunk with feelings of control, forgetting to also ponder the demands of her own sexual appetite.
Ashford and Fogel naturally know that the shiny novelty of such feelings of power wears off fast: before long, Margot finds herself intimate with someone she doesn’t even want, wondering how the hell she even let things go that far in the first place. In fact, some of the most successful scenes of “Cat Person” observes Margot as she has a frank conversation with herself in a different dimension: Is this what she wants? Can she back out of her consent, even if she initiated the whole thing? But what if he gets angry? What if this “Star Wars” and Harrison Ford-loving mega geek tries to hurt her? Does he even have the two cats he kept texting about during their harmless flirtation phase? Was it all a lie?
A self-absorbed guy not picking up on a woman’s non-verbalized disinterest is sadly an all-too-common scenario. And predictably, these two experience the same event from totally different perspectives outside of the bedroom, too. In another one of the film’s effective scenes that would play so differently in a David Fincher movie, the duo gets accidentally locked in a storage room one night at Margot’s college. She panics, imagining violent visions of Robert—a frequent dystopian illusion that she has—who might or might not be a predator for all she knows. Having learned an old-fashioned rom-com version of romance from stories where women somehow tolerate minor stalking, Robert, on the other hand, gets caught off guard by Margot’s distrust. Wasn’t it the most romantic gesture ever that he just turned up at her dorm entirely unannounced?
“Cat Person” is all mind games and power dynamics in its first two acts, where even wait times between texts become tools for Margot to exploit the supposed leg-up she feels on Robert. The rhythm of these segments mostly sticks the landing, except when some of the side characters of the story—like Margot’s wise professor (the inimitable Isabella Rossellini), traditional mom (Hope Davis), stepdad and ex-boyfriend—claim screen time in scenes that feel like mouthpiece-y afterthoughts to varying degrees, begging for either more depth or elimination. Elsewhere, the film launches a completely swing-for-the-fences, out-of-left-field third act, whisking the tale to surprising grounds once Margot starts fearing the harm the dumped, stalkerish Robert might be capable of.
Unlike the patiently unfolding initial acts that come with some excess, this final turn where Margot refuses hypothetical victimhood appears rushed, even undercooked. Still, the bloody, messy, and fiery set-piece is a daring, well-choreographed gamble, playing like a crossbreed of a home-invasion thriller and “Get Out” that even finds space for some keen reflections on female friendships.
With the springy “The Flight Attendant” under her belt, Fogel orchestrates the action in the finale with panache, accelerating the misunderstanding between Robert and Margot until there are no clear-cut villains and victims; only an increasingly violent situation escalated by poor judgment, social fears and insecurities. Truth be told, Fogel doesn’t seem to have a well-defined thesis throughout this expertly pulled-off sequence that nonetheless feels out of place, like a haphazard contemporary third floor built on top of an old two-story building. Is the current climate around gender dynamics making us all a little crazy, a little bad, and too unforgivingly mistrustful? Regardless, it’s still worthwhile to consider the post-#MeToo ideas that “Cat Person” throws at the wall around notions like empathy, consent, and the vitality of crystal-clear communication and see what sticks. What you will end up with might look like a messy artifact, but one that will at least rattle in ways both witty and provocative. [B]
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