Cat Person (2023 | USA | 120 minutes | Susanna Fogel)

first take: It is the highest mark of success that Cat Person (the movie) created many images even more unsettling than the graphic that accompanied and discouraged me from ever reading “Cat Person” when it saturated social media feeds a couple years ago.

Adapting Kristen Roupenian’s viral fiction, Susanna Fogel casts Emilia Jones as the repertory cinema concessions clerk who enters into a confusing relationship of projection with an older patron named Richard. She’s a college sophomore, he’s played with the perfect blend of hapless lumbering mystery (or maybe lingering menace) by Nicholas Braun (Succession Cousin Greg, as a beardo in flannels and khakis). She assumes he’s an ancient twenty-five, because his eyes crinkle.

Meeting not particularly cute over the unpopularity of Red Vines, Margot gives Richard her number on a lark and they spend weeks texting. Their rapport builds through Messenger bubbles on screen, always from Margot’s perspective as she goes about collegiate life, doing late-night coursework, and chatting with her ultra-protective Feminist Reddit-obsessed roommate. In bringing the story from page to screen, Fogel explores Margot’s vivid imagination for worst-case scenarios be it a stray dog decapitating a nosy RA or a series of true crime-inspired panics over how in-person encounters could go horribly wrong. As an extra treat, we also get monologues on the brutal mating habits of instincts, including sexual dominance prominence of queens, from the always outstanding Isabella Rossellini as an anthropology professor with a tender place in her heart for ants. If only Margot was in a position to take these lessons to heart.

Although Margot and Richard’s epistolary relationship seems cute on their screens, it becomes increasingly awkward when they finally meet up in “the real world”. An impromptu get-together goes horribly wrong, the official first date goes worse, an ever blossoming series of ignored red flags. From the first misguided peck on the forehead to the excruciatingly awkward first kiss, Braun makes obliviousness an art form, and Jones sells her character’s tolerance of escalating cringe with credibility (at one point, in the form of a three-way conversation between imagined selves as a distraction from very bad pity sex). She’s young, attractive, curious, and frankly enjoys the thrill of the attention.

The build-up, virtual courtship, and the ensuing fallout from in-person debacle work well, exposing the twists and terrors of modern dating, mismatched priorities, and irrational sense of responsibility to a person who exists largely in your own mind. Stresses and ramifications play out compellingly, but as the film builds to a stirring cringe comedy conclusion, it takes one last swing beyond the source material that made it the New Yorker‘s most read piece of short fiction. Instead of letting the credits roll, it instead invents a third act that feels conjured from one of Margot’s many preceding flights of disastrous fancy (one almost wishes for a “twas all a dream” cutaway). While I can appreciate the impulse to go big in underlining the story’s themes in explicit fashion, sometimes less is so very much more.