Meanwhile I was disturbed by the number of trailers we saw for coming attractions starring Jason Clarke. I mean, I swear he was in like all of them (except Us), like somebody buried him in the Pet Sematary, and he just kept coming back. (This was especially weird because Jason Clarke isn’t even in Greta.) I kept thinking of a (very) old SNL sketch where they all get locked in a movie theater showing endless previews for films starring Shelly Long.
So by the end of this half hour block of horror trailers, I was feeling pleasantly bemused, and my husband was battling a sensation of mounting dread.
This movie is made to be mocked. It would be perfect fodder for Austin’s Master Pancake Theater. It needs its own Honest Trailer. (At several moments, I kept imagining the Epic Voice Guy saying, “Starring: broken stuff.”)
Not that Greta is bad. It isn’t. It just seems to invite running commentary, like A Quiet Place, a film that improved immensely for me once I watched it again at home and experienced others’ real time reactions. (Of course, maybe our sixteen-year-old is just hilarious and makes watching any movie more fun.)
Let me give you the premise. Chloë Grace Moretz plays a recent college graduate named Frances McCullen who sees an unattended bag on the New York City subway.
So she picks it up.
That’s the protagonist we’re dealing with in this film. Not surprisingly, a bunch of bad stuff happens to her.
Eventually.
After a fairly early “shocking” revelation (spoiled by the film’s trailer), Greta settles into about an hour of Moretz’s character staring out of windows in horror and breaking stuff. Seriously, I don’t know how she keeps her job as a server at a high end restaurant. She’s always staring out the window, and she breaks everything. I’m surprised that restaurant has any glassware left. If it gets taken out of her paycheck every time, I have a hard time believing she’s coming out ahead by doing this job.
I guess it doesn’t matter since she lives with her rich friend (and former college roommate at Smith), Erica (Maika Monroe) who initially seems like a superficial flake but is gradually revealed as the most sane and dependable person in the movie.
I kept feeling like I knew Monroe from somewhere, but I don’t. The character reminded me alarmingly of Rose McGowan in Scream. (I say alarmingly because all of us who have seen Scream remember what happens after Tatum says, “I’ll be right back.”) I spent a huge chunk of the movie beside myself with alarm for Erica, who makes horror sidekick level poor choices when being followed. (“Somebody’s watching you in a crowded public space!” “No problem, I’ll just sneak off into this dark alley.” Maybe Buffy is back there! It might be a good idea. Honestly it’s kind of funny to watch somebody potentially in danger from one person repeatedly run away from well lit, crowded public spaces.)
Like many horror films, Greta is built on a foundation of people making incredibly poor choices, and most of those people are Frances. I’m not sure she ever makes a good choice if there’s a worse option available. (I’m not a savvy New Yorker, but even I can tell you, “If someone is stalking you, quit going to her house!”) Also Frances constantly rides her bicycle around her apartment, and I don’t know why. (“Exercise,” my husband says. Maybe it’s to show us she has strong leg muscles?)
Greta might be more aptly titled Always Tell A Friend Where You Are: the Movie. Young women need a network of trustworthy friends especially if they want to go anywhere and remain unharmed. Maybe this is also true for young men. I don’t know because I’ve only ever been a woman.
I could never decide if this movie was demonizing older women (you’ve got this creepy woman of a certain age who wants to put young girls in her box), or trying to shine light on the fact that women of all ages are ignored and underestimated. Young women are trivialized, old women are ignored, rich girls are easily dismissed.
It’s sort of like a big, crazy mashup of fairy tales, classic films, Freudian slips, and broken dishes. It’s like Sybil meets Psycho meets Misery meets inverse “Hansel and Gretel” with a bunch of other vaguely familiar material thrown in for good measure. (At one moment, Greta dances around like one of those tiny ballerinas in a children’s music box, and I suddenly thought of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.)
I basically only went to see this film because I found Isabelle Huppert so hilarious in
I Heart Huckabees (which I haven’t seen in like fifteen years and barely remember). I like Chloë Grace Moretz, too, though I don’t watch a lot of horror, so I think of her as Hit-Girl in
Kick-Ass, another film I haven’t watched since the year it came out, even though I own the Blu-ray.)
Best Scene:
Relatively late in the film we get this amazing dream sequence, but we’re not sure when it comes. What is dream? What is reality? This is by far the best part of the film, especially the way it ends. It left me with such a claustrophobic feeling of horror. I truly did not care what else happened to Frances, as long as it was something other than what was currently happening. In this segment, the movie fully worked for me. I was suddenly deeply involved. If the entire film had been like this, I don’t think I could have watched it. Most of the time,
Greta feels more like vague, disturbing, borderline comedy than horror. But this part is intense.
Best Action Sequence:
I thought it was impossible that any baking attempt could get uglier and messier than what sometimes goes down with my bickering children and catastrophic kitchen skills, but I think it’s safe to say that Greta should have skipped dessert.
Her dinner scene is also fantastic. I thought my family were the champs of making a scene in a restaurant, too, but not so. Isabelle Huppert shows here she can break stuff much faster and more efficiently than Chloë Grace Moretz.
Best Scene Visually:
One scene in the film reminded me so much of
Psycho that I thought I could call how it would end. But I was cautious because
Greta had fooled me before. I like the look of the ending of this scene because 1) I was right, and 2) It’s just so weird. (Side note: Greta’s antics here enraged my husband. Good thing she never taught him to make cookies.)
The Negatives:
Greta is fun to watch. I’ll bet it would also be fun to analyze more deeply. But the beginning of the movie is slow. I mean, the reveal of Greta as an ominous figure actually comes really fast (before the movie, in fact, if you watched the trailer). But much of the movie isn’t all that scary because it’s easy to see ways out of the situation for the character if she truly wanted to get away (and possibly a part of her doesn’t).
It would actually become extremely funny (eventually, like Sideshow Bob and the rakes) if the entire movie were just Frances staring out windows and breaking stuff when she sees Greta across the street in various places all over town and nothing else ever happened. For a while, it seems like the film is headed in that direction. (Well, not really, but my thoughts were definitely headed in that direction during slow segments.)
As the movie goes on, it gets more and more scary, and more and more fun. But it also gets more and more plot holes. To call them “plot holes” may not be fair. We know from what we’ve seen earlier that Frances has extremely poor judgment and never breaks stuff at the right time. And there could be explanations for some of these apparent gaps. We get the sense that so much convoluted stuff must be happening off screen to explain what we are seeing. I’m particularly confused about why the police stop being involved.
The ending seems a little…
Well, you know what? The ending is great. It’s very fun to watch. This film is not overly concerned with realism, but it is a great cautionary tale for young women who are considering striking up a friendship with anyone. Remember girls, you’re never safe. These days, you’re better off getting a fancy enema than speaking to a stranger. That’s what
Greta taught me.
Overall:
