Told ya it was a gonna be a slow movie month. This week picked back up to more normal rates. I finally made it back to the Tuesday night movie meetup since I had a freebie bday ticket to use. I do love a good thriller and can very much appreciate a film where the main characters are ladies, I just wish it was better overall.
Chloe Grace Moretz finds a bag on the subway, which she returns to its owner Greta, Isabelle Huppert. Ignoring the plausibility problems with that part of the story (does nobody See Something, Say Something anymore?), the two start to form a friendship that fills their respective mother/daughter voids. When Chloe’s Frances finds a stash of identical green bags with women’s names and phone numbers on them, she realizes that Greta has been planting these bags across town for clearly some nefarious purpose. She attemps to end the friendship, but Greta ain’t gonna go quietly into the night and begins to show her true psycho stalker colors.
This film had a few things going for it. The initial stalker escalation felt like a very real this-could-actually-happen-to-me type of horror. And there was this sense of powerlessness that went with it. Cops and other potentially helpful people couldn’t or wouldn’t actually help. All of that was terrifying. But the thin plot then got stretched to the point of ridiculousness and the escalations got less and less plausible.
Even worse, the moments that were meant to be scary or threatening instead elicited laughs from the audience. Not just from the meetup dudes, but throughout the whole auditorium. I don’t exactly think that’s what they were going for.
Isabelle Huppert is wonderful (I still woulda voted for her when she was Oscar nominated for Elle) . She chews scenery like a boss, is clearly having the time of her life, and she is such a menacing villain. If she had better material, she’d go down in the crazy psycho hall of fame, and I’d love to see the movie where she does have better material. This one will be more forgettable.
Greta – \m/ \m/ \n