Critics reviews

It's well worth staying for (or seeking out) for anyone interested in flawed yet fascinating films, or in what happens to the power of suggestion in an era when you can show as many breasts and blood-spurts as you like. It is a messy, schizoid film, an uneven mixture of new and old material that lands somewhere between the druggier sci-fi trips of the 1970s and the makeup-and-creature-effects blockbusters of the 1980s.

As darkened swamps, claustrophobic zoos and decrepit mansions become the stomping grounds for the unfolding narrative, the richness of atmosphere often makes up for the overwrought dramatics of the plot. Narratively, Cat People doesn't quite come together, but the humid locale feels infused with a heavy longing and destructive desire.

According to Hollywood legend, throughout the shooting of Cat People Paul Schrader was seeing two different psychiatrists. This sounds wickedly apt because the film is a tale straight from the unconscious, about split selves and forbidden desires, yet it also finds a disorientating cinematic chemistry between two forms by combining eroticism and horror.

Watching the movie again, on Blu-ray, in a new edition that beautifully reproduces the film grain as it looked when I originally saw it, it is impossible not to feel a jolt of awe... Kinski, with that amazing innocence-meets-experience bearing, little-girl voice (which could drop an octave into an ominous purr when required), and young-boy haircut/physique, allows Cat People to go into truly unsettling areas.

...Cat People is very much a Paul Schrader film, and it shouldn't be a surprise that the filmmaker is drawn to this kind of horror movie, either, as almost all of his films are occupied with the emotional detritus that sex—conventional and outré alike—leaves in its wake. But Schrader, at his best, is a poet of the guilt of sex, not of the joy, and that's a problem for a film that's clearly intended as an erotic thriller.