Greta

I get that Greta is supposed to be a loopy little thriller.  I even get that it's supposed to go off the rails as it goes on.  But, I just didn't believe a second of it, not even when it was pretending to be subtle early on.  Co-writer and director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) has made an implausible movie out of a concept that could have been lean and chilling.  And the further he goes for broke, the more I felt distanced from what I was watching.

The concept is simple enough.  A timid and sweet young woman named Frances (Chloe Grace Moretz) finds a purse left behind on a New York subway.  Rather than take it to the authorities, she decides to personally track down the bag's owner, and deliver it to her.  The owner in question is Greta (Isabelle Huppert), an elderly Frenchwoman living on her own, and pining over the various things she has lost in her life, including her husband (now deceased), her dog (also gone), and an adult daughter who lives in Paris, studying music, and will not speak to her.  For reasons not fully explained in the film, Frances is immediately taken in by this woman, and begins shunning her friends for Greta.  I get that Frances has lost her mom, and maybe she sees Greta as a sort of mother figure, since she does not have a good relationship with her father.  But, the movie does not really develop the relationship between these two women all that well.

That's because the movie wants to hurry things along, and get to the crazy and over the top stuff.  After a few scenes of Frances and Greta sharing some nice moments in the park, or helping Greta pick out a new dog at a shelter, it's quickly established that something is not right.  It turns out that the bag Frances found on the subway that night was planted.  Greta has a whole cupboard full of identical bags which she uses to lure in naive young women like her into a clingy and controlling relationship.  And when Frances tries to back away and cut Greta out of her life, the old woman just won't take a hint.  She calls constantly, leaves hundreds of texts, and then she starts showing up everywhere in Frances' life.  Greta is not just a stalker, you see, but a Movie Stalker, who can seemingly be anywhere at any time.  The police can't do anything as the woman starts popping up everywhere, even while Frances is at work, or at her own apartment building. 

I can see how a movie like this could be creepy or intimidating with a different approach, but Jordan is using a very broad brush here, almost as if he is constantly winking at the camera.  Things intensify to such extremes that we're not shocked when the true psychotic nature of Greta is ultimately revealed.  As Greta goes off the rails of madness, poisoning her victims or dancing ballet as she drugs somebody who happens to get too close, the movie goes right along with her.  If Jordan is going for shocks here, it's just too silly to take seriously.  And if he is trying to make a very weird dark comedy of sorts, it's just not strange enough to be funny.  It exists in that strange middle realm where I was admiring the performances and the craft of the film, but I just wasn't invested in what I was watching.  As weird as the movie was, I never found it all that interesting.  It's certainly not a tame movie (there is a moment of strong violence that is quite shocking), but it was not off-putting enough to put me on edge.

Greta is also not that smart of a thriller.  It relies on tired old gimmicks, like characters wandering into places they shouldn't be, or doing things they obviously shouldn't.  The movie is so gimmicky, it even has a scene where the main character is having a nightmare, wakes up, and then it turns out they're still in a nightmare, and wake up again.  I thought that dream-within-a-dream stunt went out in the 1980s.  I also never believed that Greta wasn't crazy, even when the movie was trying to convince me she was just a harmless old woman.  Huppert's performance is just off enough that she raises red flags in the audience from the beginning.  This makes it all the more frustrating that Moretz is forced to go along with her for so long, and takes too long to piece together that this woman does not have her best interest in mind. 

I understand that this is not meant to be a subtle movie, but that does not excuse the music score that drives home every moment with a sledgehammer, or the sometimes stilted dialogue.  I honestly don't know what Jordan was going with this.  He starts out with a clever and potentially creepy idea, and then he tackles it so broadly that I lost all interest.  In the end, Greta delivers no genuine thrills, nor does it get any laughs from its increasingly ludicrous tone.  It simply disappoints.

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