Sundance reviews: Cat Person, Justice, Fair Play, and the angry good guy

Cat People — a film adaptation of the New Yorker short story that took over your Twitter feed in December 2017 — begins with a now-familiar paraphrase of a Margaret Atwood quote: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them,” she says on screen. text. “Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

The crowd laughed nervously as the word popped up Cat PeopleSundance premiere. This is a powerful precis for the film, which tells the story of the relationship between 20-year-old Margot (Emilia Jones) and a tall man named Robert (Nicholas Braun). They met at the movie theater where he worked behind the concession counter. They have a horrible, horrible text message relationship, followed by an unpleasant person, and then everything goes south.

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This movie is good, until it isn’t; director Susanna Fogel deftly pushes Margot’s interior narrative into the visual medium by adding secondary characters (like her best friend Tamara, played by the always fantastic Geraldine Viswanathan), cleverly deploying dream sequences, and rendering Margot’s squirmy experiences with visceral precision. But there is a third act that destroys the ambiguity of the original story. Long story short, we still have a lot of questions, as we will at the end of the relationship. But the movie tries to tie loose ends up, and the result is maddening.

But, I’m the happiest. And Atwood’s paraphrase kept coming to mind, as I began to count the other films I had just seen at Sundance that might have claimed it. There is a certain type of “good man” who breaks into incandescent rage when his ego is bruised – when he suspects, in other words, that women laugh at him – and rendering him recognizably on the screen in risk-averse, male- led Hollywood has not always apparently it works. Sundance was proving it.

At Cat People, For example, Margot found herself desperate not to assert her own desire to have sex with Robert, and told herself it was just easier to go through with him. He was bigger than her, and she was worried about putting herself in danger. But in the bedroom, she no longer fears that Robert, still a stranger to many, is a monstrous serial killer. He’s just worried about how he might react if he feels humiliated – and does something he regrets.

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Margot’s sentiments fit right in Fair play, another of the Festival’s buzziest films, a relationship drama inspired by, if not actually hewing to, the outline of an old-school erotic thriller. (Netflix picked up the film for $20 million, so you’ll be able to see it soon.) This time the couple at the center, Emily and Luke (Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich), are high-finance stars who have to hide their relationship at work. But when he rose through the ranks, things turned sour.

Fair play it’s caustic and enthralling, but usually it’s the kind of film that makes you wince with recognition – or, in the case, if you’ve ever made yourself small so the anger of insecure people. Luke seems like the best supportive boyfriend until he feels that others are laughing at him, that the life he is so sure he should lead is about to collapse, and Emily, who loves him, may see him through a different lens.

What came into clear relief Fair play – and on Cat People, for that matter — it is for these people, the kind that are proud of themselves in the “good man”, the woman who is dating is not a problem. These women are accommodating and encouraging far from their own comfort. It is that these people believe that they deserve something (a woman, a job, a very specific type of respect) just for being there; when they get even a whiff of the opposite, they snap into verbal and physical violence.

Maybe you have never run into this; perhaps you have never experienced it first hand. But I guarantee you have someone you love. I know I have. What these two films can do, and what it is difficult to do in other media, is to make the audience in the mental space of women who feel afraid or just worried that enough confidence and self-confidence will threaten a person, and that there will be consequences.

Crucially, both films are less about individual characters than the world around them. It’s a world that cultivates people like Luke and Robert, makes them promises they can’t fulfill, and then gives tacit license to strike out when they don’t get what they want. That’s why they feel a piece with JusticeDocumentary by Doug Liman about the allegations against current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and what the women who accused him did when they brought the story to the public eye.

Justice center especially on Deborah Ramirez, who alleges she was the subject of grotesque harassment by Kavanaugh while a student at Yale. Ramirez’s story has been told, but for the film, he revisits the story and talks about the consequences of the allegations. Cut together with Christine Blasey Ford’s congressional testimony and Kavanaugh’s own hearing before his confirmation, it’s a pretty brutal movie to watch.

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But what sticks out in concert with movies like that Cat People and Fair play is the vehemence – which reads, on the screen, as almost inexplicably explosive – with which Kavanaugh denied the allegations. angry. His inability to show the humility you expect from someone on the highest court in the land. It’s the little lies that are told for no reason that make the film strictly journalistic. His blistering, red-faced anger.

It’s like you’re seeing Luke or Robert explode at Emily or Margot, in a way that doesn’t match anything that explodes, because there’s a lot more going on here than anger at perceived mistreatment. It is the rage of a man who has been crossed, the stupid panic spiral of a child who has been caught playing. And on the screen, you can watch, and see how terrible and irrational it is. You can’t walk out of one of these movies with a sense of comfort and satisfaction. It is a testimony to the broken world we live in, and how far we have to go.

Fair Play, Cat Peopleand Justice premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Cat People will be distributed by Netflix; Fair play and Justice now waiting for distribution.