IN THEATRES: Greta

After she finds a handbag on the train, Good Samaritan Frances (Chloe Grace Moretz) returns it to its owner, lonely widow Greta (Isabelle Huppert). Having recently lost her mother, Frances sees an opportunity to reclaim something of what she has lost.

But she quickly realises that Greta's needs are far greater than her own - and quite possibly fatal...

I feel like the trailer really did not help this movie's cause - I have been avoiding trailers for the last year or so, and I caught this one in front of some other movie. The trailer reveals the hook of the movie, which is necessary to get the punters in. But sadly that hook is really the only thing movie has going for it.

Neil Jordan is a great filmmaker, with a facility for taking genre templates and using them as the jumping-off points: the fairy tale revisionism of The Company of Wolves; the multifaceted relationship between a sex worker and her driver hiding in the crime structure of Mona Lisa; the IRA thriller that morphed into a love story in The Crying Game.

There really is nothing going on this story. I spent the runtime waiting for something to shift, and for the movie to reveal what it was really about. Nada - the movie is literally what it is about.

The closest the movie gets to feeling fresh is the way it visualises its villain's lair - one of this movie's most successful elements is the juxtaposition of Greta’s home, with its artefacts of another age - nestled in a side street, hidden away from the urban environment around it. There is gothic quality to the character's obsession with the past, but outside of this mise-en-scene, it does not really go anywhere.

At a fundamental level, there is something not quite right about Greta. The big problem is the script - I could see most of the story’s moves coming, and the movie’s more traditional suspense elements feel undercooked. There are a few sequences where some new information is revealed which felt obvious, or were ruined by sloppy editing (the most egregious example is when Frances is surprised by Greta standing outside the restaurant where she works).

There is a stalking sequence involving cellphones that is pretty good, and a murder involving a hypodermic and ballet which is just odd enough to stick in the memory. But rarely does it feel like the characters are in danger.

Throughout the viewing experience, it felt like the movie was in neutral - I kept expecting something nasty to happen. But until (SPOILERS) Greta kidnaps Frances, nothing really happens. There needs to be a death or something. The movie is attempting to be a slow burn but it ultimately feels like slack pacing. Sadly for Jordan fans, even Stephen Rea’s obligatory role feels unnecessary (he’s basically playing Martin Balsam’s character from Psycho).

Greta is not a chore to get through, but there is a lack of escalation to the way the movie builds tension that makes it feel a bit pedestrian. The fact that Frances does not play a significant part in her escape, and this experience does not fuel any kind of character development - the back third of the movie just feels like a collection of plot points.

On the plus side, the acting is good. Moretz, Huppert and Maika Monroe (as Moretz’s best friend) make the movie more watchable than it otherwise would be. Moretz is just terrific - I am really hoping she gets more leading roles off of this - she is so understated and empathetic, but never overplays the sadness that motivates the character to reach out to Greta. Even though the movie is pretty conventional, Moretz's Frances never feels like a cliche - she is a genuinely good person trying to get out of a bad situation on her own terms. On a slightly different note, based on her rapport with Monroe, I would totally be into a buddy movie with them as besties going on a caper.

Huppert has been an institution for decades, and she is on good form here, but I really wish the script was more original. Greta is just a garden variety psychopath (she even gets one of those last-minute resurrections ala so many hackneyed thrillers.

There is a good story in Greta - but the execution never rises above its familiar parts.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond called The James Bond Cocktail Hour. Every episode, we do a review of one of the books and one of the movies, picked at random. 

In the latest episode we review the 1968 novel Colonel Sun, written by Kingsley Amis. Subscribe on iTunes.