Anyone who’s seen the trailers for Greta knows this is not the first time they’ve seen a movie similar to this. It’s one part Fatal Attraction, one part Misery, one part One Hour Photo. Though while many of the movies this bears similarities to are meant to be taken a little more seriously, Greta tends to be more over-the-top, and winds up at its best when it goes into some truly whacky territory.
The movie follows Frances McCullen, a young waitress from a small-town who moved to New York City and is simply trying to enjoy a nice quiet life with her roommate Erica (Maika Monroe). One day, she finds a handbag on the subway belonging to a woman named Greta Hideg (Isabelle Huppert) and goes to return the bag to her. Greta turns out to be a lonely widowed piano teacher whose daughter is away studying in France. Frances, whose mother died a long time ago and has a strained relationship with her father (Colm Feore), feels bad for Greta and the two form a friendship, spending an unhealthy amount of time together, before Frances discovers there's much more to Greta than meets the eye.
The first half of Greta is filled with plenty of questionable decisions made and part of what keeps one invested is its brilliant self-awareness. This movie tends to test your suspension of disbelief, mainly through many of the decisions that Frances makes. She seems like she’s a bit too gullible at times, which can be at times frustrating, but at the same time, one can give her decisions a pass as the film keeps reminding everyone that she does what she does because she’s not a native New Yorker and many of her actions would be okay if she was still in her (unnamed) small hometown.
It doesn’t excuse every single one of her actions and they can still be slightly aggravating at times, but one can still believe that Frances is a real person. The film uses Maika Monroe’s Erica as a way to speak for the audience. Every time Frances does something we know we wouldn’t do, Erica calls Frances out on it. The dialogue can feel a bit too on-the-nose at times, but Monroe has enough fun with the role that she keeps it pretty casual and full of playful insults rather than being preachy in every scene.
The movie starts off with a very sugary sweet tone as it builds up Frances and Greta’s initial relationship, though when it shifts into the obsessive stalker territory, it cranks things up to eleven extremely quickly and becomes wildly over-the-top. The movie consistently uses various tropes seen in many other horror movies or stalker movies but rather than trying to still remain grounded, it pushes things to the max, going into campy territory plenty of times, and sometimes even playing these tropes for laughs. Things will get quiet for a moment before someone has a sudden loud burst of energy that will keep the audience on their feet. We’ll get cliches such as the loud, screechy music as the intensity heats up, as well as some over-the-top jump scares but the film manages to have some fun with these familiar tactics so that they become more forgivable.
The movie feels very much like a Hitchcock film gone insane. The film is shot in the same voyeuristic style as some of Hitchcock’s classic films such as Psycho or Rear Window. We’ll see long tracking shots of characters getting followed around, with the camera always staying at a distance but never losing focus, keeping in line with the stalker element of the movie. Scenes such as these will be accompanied by sinister-sounding music that will suddenly explode as the energy turns up. Meanwhile, the titular character feels like a more demented version of classic Hitchcock villains such as Rear Window’s Thorwald or Shadow of a Doubt’s Uncle Charlie.
All the while, the film’s strongest point is its lead actress, Isabelle Huppert. A movie that gets as zany as this movie did needed some stellar acting in order to not be written off as unwatchable, and Huppert pulls no punches. Her acting is gloriously over-the-top but seriously committed. She channels a lot of the same energy as Kathy Bates did in Misery, but turns up the whacky antics even further, with breakdowns and devilish taunting that will leave one giddy with laughter but fully invested in what this character would do next.
Huppert has solid support from Chloe Grace Moretz, who has her own history of over-the-top performances with the Kick-Ass movies, but plays it fairly grounded in reality here. She turns in a fairly sweet performance here and as silly as some of her decisions are, she manages to get the audience’s sympathy fairly easily. We get annoyed with her decisions because we care about her. By the end of the movie, she even proves herself to be an effective “scream queen.”
The only one from the supporting cast who’s used fairly effectively is Grace’s now-fellow scream queen Maika Monroe. As mentioned earlier, she acts as a voice for the audience, and manages to bring a fun, sarcastic energy to the movie to keep the pace moving along. While not over-the-top, she turns in a highly energetic performance that makes her just as enjoyable as the two leads. The rest of the cast, as talented as they are, are given very little to do, through no fault of their own, and essentially go to waste, including Colm Feore, Zawe Ashton, and The Crying Game’s Stephen Rea.
Greta is very much a B-movie that some will adore for its campy qualities while others will dismiss as being too ridiculous. The movie is frantically off-the-wall, and has some really tense moments of high suspense, but at the same time plays some of its live-wire energy up for laughs. It stays watchable though thanks to a solid lead cast, in particular Isabelle Huppert. While this isn’t as good as some of the other thrillers it bears similarities to, it still makes for a really fun time.
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