"Cat Person" is a horror movie in which the source of the horror is never quite clear. The lead characters — Margot (Emilia Jones, of "CODA"), a 20-year-old college student, and Robert ("Succession's" Nicholas Braun), an enigmatic older man — are drawn to each other but can never quite come together. An opening on-screen quote, attributed to novelist Margaret Atwood, suggests to the viewer what might lie in store: "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."
The movie is based on Kristen Roupenian's short story of the same name, which went viral after it was published in the New Yorker in 2017. Now, director Susanna Fogel ("The Flight Attendant"), working with a script by Michelle Ashford, has stretched out Roupenian's brief tale into a two-hour movie by adding almost 40 minutes of new plot. Admirers of the author's carefully formed story, with its blunt, bull's-eye conclusion, may see this as an abject embrace of commercial considerations. Which, given the imperatives of the movie business, is hardly a sin.
Margot and Robert meet at a movie theater in which she works at the concession stand. He orders popcorn and Red Vines and — in a prefiguring of their upcoming, off-kilter relationship — she responds with a jibe about what an odd combo that is. (As are they: The bearded Robert is 13 years older than Margot, and unlike her is both socially and sexually awkward. On the other hand, he likes cats — how much of a threat could he turn out to be?)
Robert later returns to the theater to see another movie, and this time Margot joins him inside. Next, they begin exchanging flirty texts (we see Margot in her dorm room scrolling through his messages while the soundtrack gives forth with an exceedingly obvious needle drop, the Beach Boys' "In My Room"). Director Fogel introduces a number of new, non-book elements: a best friend (Geraldine Viswanathan) who pelts Margot with talk of safe spaces and "internalized misogyny"; a biology professor (Isabella Rossellini) who observes of ants that "the act of copulation is their doom"); and a party duet by Margot and her mother (Hope Davis) on "My Heart Belongs to Daddy," a song that isn't especially relevant to the proceedings.
Like Roupenian's story, the movie points no fingers at its characters. Each of them makes mistakes, but neither of them is cruel or calculating. Robert only wants a real-world girlfriend — someone outside the contemporary welter of apps and texts in which he feels himself marooned. Unfortunately for the movie, Margot is a more ambiguous case, formless and ungrounded, wandering aimlessly through life with no clue as to what she might do differently. She's a hard character to care about, even as played by the appealing Emilia Jones.
The movie is concisely well-acted and shot with moody expertise by Manuel Billeter. True to the source material, it's a carefully low-key affair — until the end, when Fogel whips up a sudden storm of action that might have been imported from another movie altogether. This concluding section of the picture is so out-of-nowhere it could almost play as a satire of conventional filmmaking — a reminder that however earnestly arty a mainstream movie might wish to be, it's still expected to sell tickets. It's a tough business.
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