GRETA – Review

Though headlined by a pair of actresses one would hope could elevate familiar material, GRETA is at its core a lurid B-movie dressed in art-house clothing, poorly-written trash that ultimately bears more than a passing resemblance to the many disposable psychological thrillers it pilfers from. GRETA tells of 20-ish waitress Frances (Chloe Grace Moretz) who’s recently moved into a lavish Manhattan loft with roomie Erica (Maika Monroe) after the death of her mother. Frances finds an abandoned purse on the subway and kindly walks to the owner’s home to return it. There lives Greta (Isabelle Huppert), a sad and fragile 60-ish French woman so thankful to Frances that she invites her inside for coffee and conversation. The women at first make a connection and Greta, who claims to have a mysterious daughter about that age, provides Frances a motherly presence. The friendship doesn’t last long. After a trip to the dog pound to get Greta a new pet, the pair head back to the older woman’s home for dinner. There Frances finds a cabinet full of purses identical to the one she had discovered on the subway! Frances tries to break things off but Greta’s psychotic streak has been exposed, the ominous horror chords on the soundtrack have been cued, and the balance of GRETA becomes standard cat-and-mouse shenanigans.

It’s a fairly irresistible premise that’s employed to laughable effect by trotting out every cliché in the book for this type of slasher/stalker ‘bunny-boiler’. GRETA was supposed to be a comeback of sorts for once-hot director Neil Jordan, who won a writing Oscar for THE CRYING GAME but hasn’t had a mainstream hit since INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE in 1994. With GRETA, Jordan pays a lot of attention to style. He and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey employ atmospheric lighting, striking camera angles, and carefully-designed art direction for Greta’s apartment, all to ensure an unnerving vibe. But Jordan’s direction merely plays up the melodramatic aspects of the lousy script where dumb people keep doing dumb things for the sake of the plot. Sure, the audience is well-aware that Greta is bat-poop nuts. We can tell by the way she phones her young friend all day long, stares at her from the street for hours while she’s trying to serve customers, pursues the roommate through the subway while surreptitiously photographing her, flips over restaurant tables while smashing wine glasses, and spits gum in Frances’ hair! The problem with GRETA is that all of this happens in the film’s first 25 minutes, so there’s still over an hour left for the audience to endure Greta’s tiresome, increasingly over-the-top lunacy.  Perhaps suspense could have been built had the script spent more time on psychological character study and saved the slasher-film stylistics for the final act, but GRETA goes off the rails quickly. For a movie meant for believability, it gets too stupid too fast and just stays there. The script never addresses exactly how Greta got so nutty.  How does she afford this Manhattan townhouse that doesn’t seem to have neighbors close enough to hear Frances’ screaming? Would Frances’ boss really make her wait on a woman he knew was stalking her? Would the police really refuse to investigate this stalking? Why, when Erica is stalked in the subway and turns her head to look behind her, is Greta magically nowhere in sight even though she has nothing to hide behind? The contrivances, coincidences, and plot holes here are far too high a hurdle.

Huppert is usually such a terrific and daring actress (her startlingly casual rape victim/avenger in ELLE was sublime), I had hoped she would elevate this character beyond the stereotypes often associated with films of this ilk. The 66-year old actress has such compelling presence, and is still as stunning as she was when she co-starred in HEAVEN’S GATE 40 years ago, but she does nothing here Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, and Shelly Winters weren’t doing during their COH (Crazy Old Hag) periods in the 1960s. Moretz drips with doe-eyed innocence but one dumb decision after another made by Frances (at one point she’s stalking Greta back out of concern for that pooch) will mostly cause audiences to react with an exasperated “Oh, come on!”, though she does wield a mean cookie cutter in the film’s one truly shocking moment!

GRETA is cheesy, but at a breezy 96 minutes, not totally unwatchable. It’s a somewhat entertaining absurdity if you are willing to check all logic at the door. I almost wish GRETA had been even worse and played up the camp to the point of parody (some may argue it’s already there). Then we could have had a gloriously bad guilty pleasure instead of just a bad movie

1 1/2 of 5 Stars