Review: Greta

Greta
Cert: 15 / 99 mins / Dir. Neil Jordan / Trailer



Based on one of those timeless hypothetical questions like 'but if you saw an unattended bag on the Tube and didn't just leave it because that looks like some obvious form of entrapment, what are the reasons you wouldn't immediately hand it in to station staff?, Neil Jordan makes a baffling directorial return to our cinemas with Greta.

Baffling as in '…you came back for this, Neil?'.

We follow Frances (Chloë Grace Moretz) as she takes the bait noted above, realising all-too-late that she's been the good samaritan to an absolute sociopath, Greta (Isabelle Huppert, proving to be both the blessing and curse of set-dressers as she chews through the scenery before the director has called cut). Things get out of hand in the first act, although with Frances being the kind of character who rides a bicycle around her flat and is shown having conversations in a cinema during a movie, she deserves everything that comes her way, frankly.

CUE

The screenplay doesn't tease out the plot, with its twists and turns arriving promptly and on-cue. Although Greta is set in the present day, there's a very mid-90s feel to the narrative itself. Too sharp to be classed as Hitchcockian, but way too naive in its execution for 2019. Jordan may not be doing anything new here, but he knows when to push the right dramatic buttons and fire up a fraught string-section.

Greta is one of those movies where the industrial levels of foreshadowing mean that it probably works better if you haven't seen the trailer. Yet at the same time, the film has been so undermarketed that without a promo-reel you'd be unlikely to come across it at all. It's not demonstrably awful, but runs like clockwork and is ultimately very forgettable. Which is probably just as well.

BOBBY

Despite a delightfully batshit-crazy turn from Huppert*¹, the ultimate antagonist here is human nature. And while that's a constant of storytelling across the ages, I'm just not sure that Greta has a lot to say. Although I'm now more determined than ever to get a job Photoshopping together the glimpsed family snaps for characters' background stories in movies. Because apparently you can still turn in any old shite and they'll use it on-set.

I'm also impressed that someone at the marketing agency has said to their boss 'Well this hysterical urban pantomime sounds pretty much identical to Pedro Almodóvar's introspective, generation-spanning Spanish-language film, Julieta. I'll just do the poster I did for that one, yeah..?

Yeah whatever mate, no one's watching.

Greta is so much like Single White Female meets The People Under The Stairs that I'd be amazed if this screenplay hadn't been lying on a shelf since 1995. As throwbacks go, it's more fun than Unforgettable, at any rate.



Not really.



Stream it out of curiosity. You will never watch this again so there's no need for it to take up shelf-space.



Moretz is solid as always, but why cast Maika Monroe then give her a supporting role in a movie which feels custom made for her usual trashy appearance-choices?



That's entirely possible.



There is not.



Level 2: Stephen Rea's in this, and he was in V for Vendetta with Natalie 'Amidala' Portman.





*¹ Everyone in the movie talks about "the French woman" but I swear to god Huppert is doing a German accent. I know the actress is French but is that how she sounds normally? I can't remember the last thing I watched her in. ^{[ BACK ]}


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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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