A waitress befriends a lonely older woman, only to discover she is
psychologically disturbed.
Directed by: Neil Jordan
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Chloë Grace Moretz, Maika Monroe,
Colm Feore, Zawe Ashton, Stephen Rea
Neil Jordan's Greta mashes up two currently
unfashionable thriller sub-genres - the 'Psycho Biddy' movies of the 1960s,
in which mature actresses like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford had a ball
playing absolute psychopaths (see
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Nanny), and the 'psychotic new friend' movies of the '90s, in which young stars
like James Spader and Bridget Fonda found their lives ruined after
befriending an initially affable nutter (see Bad Influence and
Single White Female).
Here, the naive youngster is Frances (Chloë Grace Moretz), a
transplanted Bostonian waitress who is lucky enough to share a spacious
Manhattan apartment with her cynical New Yorker mate Erica (Maika Monroe). Much is made of how innocent and unsuited to life in the Big Apple
Frances is, as though she came from some one-horse town in the MidWest
rather than a big city like Boston. All of this is a setup for an act of
kindness on the part of Frances when she finds a handbag left behind on the
subway and returns it to its owner, Greta (Isabelle Huppert), a
sixtysomething French woman living a lonely existence in the city.
Pining for her own late mother, Frances adopts Greta as a surrogate Mom,
helping her pick out a dog at the local pound (uh oh), accompanying her on
walks in the park and sharing dinners in her home. When Frances discovers
a cupboard in Greta's home filled with identical handbags adorned with
post-it notes detailing the names and phone numbers of other women, she
makes her excuses and leaves. But Frances' attempts to ignore Greta don't
work too well, and she finds herself the victim of Greta's increasingly
demented campaign of stalking and harassment.
Greta is the sort of movie that's usually relegated to TV's
Lifetime Network, but in their defence, made for TV thrillers usually have
much tighter scripts than the slackly plotted Greta, and they've usually ironed out any plot inconsistencies by the time the
script gets to the shooting stage. Greta is so absolutely
riddled with plot holes, gaps in logic, improbable character behaviour and
contradictory story beats that I spent much of its running time silently
mouthing the words "Wait, what?" I was able to overlook its nonsensical
storytelling and soak up the campness for much of its running time, but by
its ludicrous final act my suspension of disbelief had been worn down by one
plot hole too many. How does Character A get into Character B's home? Why
doesn't Character X recognise character Y? Why doesn't Character Z just
stand on a chair to get over that wall... and on and on.
The main elephant in the room is the central idea that a twentysomething
built like a javelin thrower would be intimidated by a woman old enough to
be her grandmother. Greta
relies an awful lot on a familiarity with the screen persona Huppert has
fashioned over her career (it's no coincidence that Greta's instrument of
choice is a piano, a nod to arguably the French star's most iconic
performance). If her presence makes you think of some of the unhinged
women she's played in the past, you might find Greta an intimidating
figure, but Jordan's film does little of its own work to convince you of
her scariness. Outside of cinephile circles, this will likely be an
introduction to the talents of Huppert for most viewers, who will likely
struggle to buy into the idea of her as an imposing antagonist.
Despite the potential in Greta's scenario to explore such themes as urban isolation, the loneliness of
our elder citizens and the divide between millennials and previous
generations, Greta is as shallow a thriller as any of its made
for TV or straight to VOD cousins. It made me wonder what an auteur from
Korea (the only country still taking the thriller genre seriously) might
have made of this setup. Perhaps we'll get one of those rare remakes where a
Hollywood movie is relocated to a foreign setting, but whoever takes it on
will have a lot of work plastering over its considerable plot holes.
Greta is on Netflix UK/ROI
now.
