IN THEATRES: Cats

You know what this is.

I watched it last night. It has been two days and I am still trying to reconcile what I just watched.

I have not had an experience like this movie since I ran out halfway through Martyrs. I was laughing, I was crying, I was screaming for it to end.

But I could not look away.

The movie starts and already feels like an assault. A car stops in an alley, a massive human figure drops a bag among the garbage and drives away.

A group of cat-people cluster around the bag and tear it open to reveal Victoria (newcomer Francseca Hayward), a naive young cat who becomes our guide into the world of cats.

We are immediately launched into a song as multiple cats start singing about being 'Jellicle cats'. Before we even have a sense of the location OR the characters we are meeting, the camera starts swirling around and the editing goes into overdrive - but rather than capturing the energy of the song, it only disorients who is who and where everyone is in relation to each other.

It is a lot to take in, and it establishes the basic sensation of watching Cats.

Through out the movie, I was enraged and impressed by the film's unwillingness to give non-fans a break. And there is almost no downtime. We go from song to song to dance number to song with no let up.

There are a few beats of spoken dialogue, but there are no downbeats, and no silence. This is wall-to-wall sound and motion for 110 minutes.

The transition between these moments are so arbitrary - at no point did I feel settled. Often there are no signs ahead of time that a new song is about to happen.

Sometimes a song about a particular character will start and since half the words are made-up nonsense it is hard to tell if they are talking about a cat or a concept. And then said character will appear, and I have a new uncanny face to haunt my brain box.

Speaking of which...

The stories of the unfinished effects have already added to the tale (har har har) of this movie - I am pretty sure I saw the un-corrected version (one of the cats seemed to be wearing sneakers in the first alley scene).

The effects are all over the place - sometimes characters' faces seemed to float free of their heads; background characters are either poorly rendered or out-of-focus.

Bad effects are one thing but when they are used to pull off some of the ideas in this movie, it tips over into genuinely unnerving.

Yes, the cats are people. But the mice are also people (with CGI faces of children, as if it was not disturbing enough).

AND there is an army of dancing cockroaches who are also anthropomorphised - we get to watch the cat people eat them.

There is even a scene where a dog shows up, but sadly it is kept offscreen.

Onto the sex!

I heard from people online that the movie was 'horny' but it is merely one component of all the surreal sh*t going on in this movie.

There is something so off-putting about these half-digital characters, and then combined with the environments, and the way that Hooper shoots them, that constantly throws off your attention. There a few moments where the characters do not seem to be interacting with the settings they are in - they either float above the floor or stand in front of backdrops that lack depth (the person I went with muttered that it looked like a Tim and Eric skit).

One of the key weaknesses of the film is that there is a severe lack of unity between the camera work and the edit. All film is based on a unity of affect - how a shot is composed is just as important as how these shots are juxtaposed with each other.

With Cats, I often found it had to tell where people were in relation to each other, or who they were looking at. There are a couple of set pieces where characters are singing toward a point out of frame but the frame is so tight I have no idea where they are, and the shots go on so long I felt boxed in.

I felt like I was trapped in a box watching this movie - which is bizarre because there is quite a lot of choreography and movement. But the pacing is all wrong, and the editing of every scene drags every moment past the point of tedium.

Every element of this movie is designed - however inadvertently - to keep you on edge. It is an achievement.

I found myself concentrating so hard to understand what was going, how it was conceived, and why it was conceived in the way it was.

Who is this movie for? What is it about? Who is the main character? Why is Judi Dench breaking the fourth wall?

After it was over, I felt like I had been through some kind of ordeal. My head was sore, I wanted to throw up and I could not stop giggling. The reason it took this long to put out this review is because I was still trying to get over the hangover of it.

But now that the movie is out of my system, I find myself unwilling to condemn it.

This movie is a unique beast. You get big bad movies all the time, but most bad movies do not stick with you. And most of them feel like bad copies of other movies.

Cats is not an ordinary bad movie.

It has a singular vision, and every choice it makes is designed to nudge the viewer closer to the edge. But it is committed.

And while the acting is al over the map, every performance is 110% earnest. They are invested to the most embarrassing and sugary degree.

This movie made me physically ill - my head felt like it was being squeezed; I was giggling uncontrollably and crying out of one eye.

There is something glorious about the fact that this movie, backed by a major studio, with this crew and cast, managed to make it through the system without being noted either to death or to blandness. Because this movie could have been excruciatingly boring.

But it is so singular and focused on whatever the hell it thinks it is that it ends up being that rarest of beasts - a legitimately great terrible big movie.

This thing is going to be immortal. There will be cult screenings of this for years to come, with in-jokes and audience rituals that people will know and parody.

For while the filmmakers may have not had an idea of what the audience was for this movie, there is one. And they will give this movie legs long after Universal has pulled the plug on its theatrical run.

More personally, those freaky human faces on cat bodies are chiseled into my retinas till the end of time.

Ignore its title and subject - this movie is a unicorn in a forest of corporatised banality.

GO SEE CATS.