Cat Person movie storyline. Margot, a college student working concessions at an art house theater, meets frequent filmgoer — and rather older local — Robert, on the job. Flirtation across the counter evolves into continuous texting. As the two inch toward romance, shifts between them, awkward moments, red flags, and discomforts pile up. Margot feels both attached and reticent, as her gnawing hesitations blossom into vivid daydreams where Robert realizes his most threatening potential. As her distrust and uncertainty mount, an evening, their relationship, and possibly their lives unravel.
Exploring power dynamics, the terrifying nature of some gray areas, and the way young women must balance their relationships to themselves alongside their lovers, Cat Person is a provocative portrait of modern dating. Director Susanna Fogel (co-writer of Booksmart) brings these questions to the screen with a vibrant tension that packs a serious punch, aided by great performances from Emilia Jones (CODA) and Nicholas Braun (Succession). Inspired by the most-read piece of fiction ever published in The New Yorker, Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person”, the film continues a conversation whose urgency is clear, present, and dangerous.
Cat Person is a 2023 psychological thriller film directed by Susanna Fogel from a screenplay by Michelle Ashford, based on the 2017 short story of the same name by Kristen Roupenian. The film stars Emilia Jones, Nicholas Braun, Geraldine Viswanathan, Hope Davis, Fred Melamed, and Isabella Rossellini.
Cat Person premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2023. It was released in the United States by Rialto Pictures on October 6, 2023. It was later released on VOD on December 1, 2023, only through Hoopla and Spectrum on Demand. Following its Sundance premiere, it received distribution offers from Netflix, Bleecker Street and Open Road Films, but StudioCanal refused due to CAA’s desire for a theatrical release. The film, which was budgeted at $12 million, was ultimately sold to Rialto Pictures and got a theatrical release in October, making only $338,541.
Film Review for Cat Person
As utterly inescapable as Kristen Roupenian’s viral, pop culture-piercing New Yorker short story Cat Person was in 2017, it didn’t seem like an obvious fit for any form of adaptation – a button-pushing speed-read that was as popular as it was self-contained. It told the story of a 20-year-old female student who briefly dates a schlubby, unreadable guy in his mid-30s (who may or may not have cats) in a way that many found instantly, uncomfortably, relatable. It was messy and uneasy and ultimately rather chilling as briefly dating someone can often be.
Its success was such that more was sought, insisted upon even. Its author got a book deal (a collection of short stories that landed with a bit of a thud) and sold a spec script (for Gen Z whodunnit Bodies Bodies Bodies, which was ultimately almost entirely rewritten). Cat Person was bought for extension as a movie, regardless of fit. Almost six years after it appeared online, it’s arriving at Sundance as something of a curio, a reminder of an online moment more than anything else. The question of “Remember Cat Person?” is almost immediately replaced with “How did they turn Cat Person into a movie?” which then warps into “Why did they turn Cat Person into a thriller?”
It’s a question that niggles throughout and feels both a result of commercial concerns and also the recent success of Promising Young Woman and Fresh, both Sundance premieres that threw bait-y issues of gender dynamics within sex and relationships into a genre blender. The balance is less even here but the underlying thesis is the same and remains effective: dating is scary. Who am I texting with? Who am I drinking with? Who am I having sex with? It’s odd, given how many of us ask these increasingly pressing questions to ourselves or to friends we confide in, that we haven’t seen more thrillers about the terrifying mystery of dating. It’s all inherently suspenseful, the giddy thrill of discovery easily overtaken by legitimate fears over safety.
For Margot (Coda’s Emilia Jones), there’s something relatively low stakes in giving her number to Robert (Succession’s cousin Greg, Nicholas Braun), an awkward regular at the cinema she works at. She’s younger, more attractive and has a confidence he doesn’t appear to. But there’s something magnetic or at least fascinatingly indefinable about him that presents itself via a series of push-and-pull texts. Her concerned friends instruct her to keep him purely as a digital connection yet they start to see each other in person and who he really is begins to slowly unravel.
It’s obviously a fraught transformation, from a 7,000-word two-hander to an almost two-hour movie, and 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, exemplified by the opening use of Margaret Atwood’s never not relevant yet contextually unsubtle quote about men fearing being made a joke out of by women while women fear being murdered by men. It’s quite possibly the most obvious way to overstate where we’re headed and along with some other clunky additions, 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.
Ashford and director Susanna Fogel, co-writer of Booksmart, do find some graceful ways to adapt their material though. There are stylish visual choices (the film never looks anything less than fantastic) and the internal monologue is transplanted to screen without relying on thudding voiceover via funny montages of Margot imagining what Robert’s life might really be like.
The standout sequence is a horribly well-realised sex scene between the pair, uncomfortably raising questions of why we let things progress so far and how we reframe it in our head while it happens to us. It’s in these harder-to-discuss, knottier moments that the film briefly shows how a successful adaptation could have worked. That same alternate version could also have benefited from Jones, who modulates fear, vulnerability and strength well. But Braun, as many had feared, is a total miscast based on his looks and also the specific type of awkwardness he possesses, far different from the one he needs.
Cat Person (2023)
Directed by: Susanna Fogel
Starring: Emilia Jones, Nicholas Braun, Geraldine Viswanathan, Hope Davis, Fred Melamed, Isabella Rossellini, Melissa Lehman, Liza Koshy, Christopher Shyer, Isaac Powell, Liza Colón-Zayas
Screenplay by: Michelle Ashford
Production Design by: Sally Levi
Cinematography by: Manuel Billeter
Film Editing by: Jacob Craycroft
Costume Design by: Ava Yuriko Hama
Set Decoration by: Ben Campbell, Caroline B. Scott
Art Direction by: Beau Tepper
Music by: Heather McIntosh
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, violence and language.
Distributed by: Rialto Pictures (United States)
Release Date: January 21, 2023 (Sundance), October 6, 2023 (United States)
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