Kritiken

what was delicately contoured and squeamishly human about Roupenian’s source material has been shrouded by a garish face-filter app... But with all the quirky needle drops substituting for real mood, and the flippant dialogue spelling everything out for us, this “Cat Person” proves as susceptible to misreading the vibe as its crossed-wires characters.

The written version of Cat Person allowed us to read between the lines, the same way we do when dissecting every phrase in a text from a crush. The film adaptation argues that there will always be ambiguity in sex and romance, but can’t quite bring itself to embrace its own uncertainty.

The film swerves into the totally unbelievable, pulling from a grab-bag of horror/erotic thriller tropes, all of which beggar belief... not only is [that] cliched, but it dissipates the unnerving power of Roupenian's story.

“Cat Person” is at its strongest when it expands upon what made Roupenian’s work so resonant: Margot’s confused and, at times, brutally honest inner monologue... Unfortunately, the same could not be said for its final act... The loose ends that made the original work compelling are inexplicably tied up, replaced by a misguided portrayal of Margot as an unreliable narrator, forced to face the consequences of her own fears.

This is two-thirds of a great movie, after that, all nuance goes up in flames in favour of the formulaic.

While [Cat Person] expands details of the original text in a few compelling ways, its new third-act addition calamitously renders the whole experience a pointless, heavy-handed, misjudged exercise that relies heavier on horror tropes than any sense of humanity.

Starting out as a dark and somewhat unknowable comedy of manners about male toxicity, Cat Person turns into a domestic thriller so absurd that it feels like another of Margot’s daydreams.

The brevity of the source material is thinly-stretched into a two-hour runtime, padded out with tedious subplots and a new, excruciating ending which undermines the initial point of its creation.

[Cat Person] takes everything that was admirable, or even just compelling, about Roupenian’s story and spins it into a scrambled, overloaded mess... No one needs a confused movie about dating confusion, and Cat Person’s ideas are so blurry it’s impossible to know what its goals are.

The more irreverent liberties a movie takes with its source material, the better. But there is nothing better about this “Cat Person,” which coarsens, flattens and torturously over-elaborates a story whose elegant concision was precisely what made it such rich and elastic interpretive fodder.

While much is added here (gaps are filled, characters are expanded and a new post-script ending is added), much is also lost. What was implicit in Roupenian’s text has been made explicit on screen, at times maddeningly so... The script from Michelle Ashford tries too hard to be The Film We Need Right Now, aiming to check off every thinkpiece issue on her way to the bloody finale.

While Susanna Fogel‘s feature film version of the story is appropriately excruciating (this is a high compliment; mostly, it will set your teeth on edge and raise the hairs on the back of your neck, just as it should), its muddled, messy, and brand-new final act feels at odds with Roupenian’s story and the very emotions it raised with its readers.