Psychological thriller has regrettable, pseudo-feminist twist
Greta
Director: Neil Jordan
Cast: Chloe¨ Grace Moretz, Isabelle Huppert
Running time: 98 minutes
The psychological thriller Greta gets off to a promising start: As a camera discreetly follows Isabelle Huppert and Chloe¨ Grace Moretz through a New York City subway, Julie London sings a silky version of Where Are
You? and director Neil Jordan’s name appears on screen.
Viewers familiar with Jordan’s previous work — from his script for Mona Lisa to the game-changing The
Crying Game — will understandably feel prepared to encounter the kind of twisty but sophisticated puzzlers he’s best known for. Er, not so fast.
As an exercise in style, Greta turns out to be a maddeningly mixed bag.
Its New York setting is continually undercut by obviously foreign filming locations — Dublin and Toronto did the honours here — and its themes of vulnerability, obsession and ritualised violence are no less drearily familiar for being given a pseudo-feminist patina.
An intriguing two-hander bursting with potential instead becomes something we’ve seen before — up to and including bizarre pivots into sadism and body horror.
Moretz plays Frances, a recent Smith College graduate who has moved to Tribeca with her best friend Erica (Maika Monroe), a wealthy fellow Smithie with no discernible job other than practising yoga and tossing off cynical bon mots about crystal meth, colonics and how the Big (rotten) Apple is going to eat Frances alive.
When the quiet, polite Frances finds an abandoned purse on the subway, she takes pains to find the owner, who turns out to be a French woman named Greta (Huppert), an eccentric but kind piano teacher who invites Frances for tea and conversation. Their relationship blooms, in part because Frances recognises a nurturing figure she’s been missing since her own mother died, and soon the two are spending more and more time together, to the increasing consternation of the possessive Erica.
Alert readers will see the words “Huppert” and “piano teacher” in the same sentence and immediately sense impending doom. While Greta has none of the torturous rigour of Michael Haneke’s 2001 film The
Piano Teacher, Jordan and coscreenwriter Ray Wright borrow heavily from other movies, especially classics from the paranoid canon of the late 1980s and early 1990s. With a nod to Fatal Attraction here and one toward Single White
Female there — not to mention brief homages to Brian De Palma all the way through — Greta feels as timewarped as its title character’s cosy but slightly confining apartment.
Despite some clever work with cellphones and text messages, the story and atmosphere feel impossibly forced, shoehorned into a milieu that never feels authentic enough to elicit real dread.
The artificiality isn’t helped by an intrusive and cliched score, which prods the audience toward jump scares and creepy reveals with the uninvited pushiness of a musical mansplainer, and which returns time and again to a tiresome motif from Liszt’s maudlin Liebestraum. Greta might pretend to turn the tables by presenting the sexualised predation of a young woman at the hands of a female malefactor instead of a male one but the fetishistic leer is just as troubling and offensive. Disturbance eventually gives way to derangement in a story that grows exponentially more irritating.
As Morton might say: When it rains, it pours.