‘Cat Person’ Should’ve Stayed a Short Story

In Susanna Fogel’s Cat Person, the film adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s viral short story of the same name, what was “terrifyingly ordinary” on the page (to use the well-chosen words of my former colleague Hazel Cills) becomes straightforwardly terrifying (or at least, that’s the idea) and even lapses into a palpably cinematic unreality. Sigh. They had to ruin a good thing.

The movie, which premiered Saturday at Sundance, renders protagonist Margot’s fears literal in a variety of ways that include repeated smash-cut fantasies and panic attacks, and finally by transforming the narrative into an out-and-out thriller, thanks to a tacked-on third act that continues the story of the characters, ratcheting up the suspense and danger to ultimately absurd lengths. Whereas Roupenian played with the potential and elliptical, Michelle Ashford’s screenplay teases out a story that should have stayed short. Where Roupenian’s version leaves off—a rebuffed Robert (stiffly played by Nicholas Braun) finally revealing his true colors by calling Margot (CODA’s Emilia Jones) a “whore” in a text—is where the real horror-movie horror begins.

What Fogel does to bring what was once an effectively restrained account into the visceral realm may excite some, but it comes at a great cost: The movie is far less stimulating as an intellectual exercise than its source material. Part of what made Roupenian’s story such a sensation after The New Yorker published it at the end of 2017 was its ambiguity. It left space that people flooded with discourse. Twenty-year-old Margot starts getting to know an older guy named Robert she meets while working at the concession stand of a movie theater. (In the story, he eventually reveals he’s 34—in the movie, he’s 33.) Because the relationship is young and for a stretch takes place almost entirely over text, Margot’s imagination fills in the gaps even after they finally hang out, alternately inflating Robert’s persona (“She was starting to think that she understood him—how sensitive he was, how easily he could be wounded—and that made her feel closer to him, and also powerful, because once she knew how to hurt him she also knew how he could be soothed”) and fearing him (“Before five minutes had gone by, she became wildly uncomfortable, and, as they got on the highway, it occurred to her that he could take her someplace and rape and murder her; she hardly knew anything about him, after all”).

When their date leads them to his place, she wants to back out of the sex but doesn’t feel empowered enough to do so. She goes through with it, and it’s bad. The connection isn’t there. Robert is inconsiderate in that ambiguous way men often are—somewhere between oblivious and aggressively selfish. Margot doesn’t know what to say to Robert’s follow-up texts. Something has shifted. Repeatedly, Margot’s inability to communicate directly creates problems for her, but Roupenian doesn’t judge—she is more interested in interrogating what’s keeping Margot from straight shooting. As a result, the story was debated with the fevor of a highly spirited comments section of a r/AmITheAsshole post (albeit on a grander scale).

Margot remains largely a blank character who is almost entirely defined by her relationship to Robert specifically and patriarchy in general.

In a meta kind of way, the Cat Person movie adopts its protagonist’s tendency to pad out a story. This is not just via the new third act, but also some character additions. Isabella Rossellini plays Margot’s professor with an ant obsession (matriarchy!), and Geraldine Viswanathan is Margot’s idealistic friend, a redditor who tries to manually sculpt her friend’s spine based more on her ideas of how things should be than any real practical know-how. Ashford’s script is indefatigable when it comes to ways of getting in Margot’s head via fantasy sequences. At one point, Margot finds herself locked in a closet with Robert and, during a panic attack, envisions him assaulting her. At another, just before she’s about to have sex with him, she has a conversation with herself—literally, a duplicate version of her across the room attempts to dissuade her from going through with it: “Hey, do we wanna do this?” They don’t, but she does.

There are certainly things the movie version of Cat Person gets right. During the awkward sex, it’s clear that part of what’s making it so bad is the lack of chemistry that obstructs Margot from getting out of her own head. She never enters that flow state that tends to make sex transcendent. Her post-“whore” behavior is a series of terrible choices that she nonetheless is compelled to make for the sake of her own safety: She arms herself with mace and buys a tracking device to place on Robert’s car after she catches him gazing at her from across the street of the movie theater in which she works. And Robert’s sadness is laid bare. Margot’s fear of hurting his feelings isn’t irrational given his fan-boy, man-baby, lonely life. He’s not her problem, but compassion has its own logic.

That said, Margot remains largely a blank character who is almost entirely defined by her relationship to Robert specifically and patriarchy in general. Roupenian’s intentionally left spaces are filled with very little to actually hold onto, and the cinematic effect is one of ineptitude. Margot’s fears of walking home alone at night, the closet panic attack, and her nightmares all suggest trauma, but the movie isn’t equipped to say whether that’s from specific abuse in her past or just being a woman in the world. I’m not sure that it even has much interest in doing so. (On the other hand, the movie does answer definitively whether Robert actually has cats.) It all ends up feeling less of a filmic statement in its own right and more like the answer to the problem of how to adapt “Cat Person.” For Cat Person, more turns out to be way, way less.