Greta Review

Big things are coming here real soon as the world is preparing for the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to make its mark, that being "Captain Marvel," of course. But before we get to that, it's time to dive into a bit of a personal adventure with a little movie called "Greta" that you may or may not have heard of. It debuted last weekend in 2,411 theaters, so you may have seen the poster around if you've been to the movies recently, but it's not a movie that got that big of a marketing push. If I'm wrong on that, then we can at least say they didn't do a great job of capturing people's attention with said marketing push as the movie could only scrounge up a $4.5 million opening this past weekend for a pretty pathetic per theater average and an eighth place finish, all of which suggests that this isn't going to be around in theaters for very long. However, it did capture my attention since I really enjoy thrillers. It had decent enough reaction from critics and audiences to convince me to give it a chance. Plus, it's not like I had much else to go see since the only other wide release was "A Madea Family Funeral" and I have zero interest in that franchise. Tyler Perry has his loyal fan base that'll show up for all his movies. I'm just not one of them. So here we are with "Greta."

In regards to thrillers, the reason why I think it's such a fun genre is the huge kick of adrenaline that you get when it's done right. Alfred Hitchcock is one of my all-time favorite directors because he's known as the master of suspense. He knew how to do this genre right, thus most of his films keep you at the edge of your seat for the entire movie and often leave you with the added bonus of having something deep to ponder once all is said and done. But sadly, there's not been a whole lot of directors since Hitchcock who have been able to master this, which is why it's a bit more rare to find a true Hitchcockian thriller in today's world. But they do exist and thus I'm always on the lookout for them, which is exactly why "Greta" intrigued me. It had all the right ingredients in place, which included a solid premise and good lead stars. Said premise involves Chloe Grace Moretz as a young woman who recently moved in with a friend in New York and finds that someone left a purse on the Subway. Even though her friend suggests she go through the purse and scavenge what she can, Chloe decides to be a good person and return the purse. She finds that it belongs to a middle-aged woman named Greta, played by French actress Isabelle Huppert, and tracks her down.

Given that both Greta and Chloe have experienced a loss recently, they start to develop a relationship with each other and become friends. Or so that's what Chloe thinks, anyways. Her friend keeps warning her against this relationship, but she doesn't listen, which turns out to be bad because Greta is a bit of a psychopath. I will say that I wanted to like this movie a lot more than I really did. So no, it's not exactly the Hitchcockian thriller that I wanted it to be. There are moments where it does succeed and I'll get to those, but I think there's a lot of problems with the direction the movie decides to go with this script. I don't know if it's right to blame director Neil Jordan for this or perhaps him and Ray Wright, who teamed up to write the screenplay, but things were just a bit off and I don't think it had anything to do with the acting or the premise behind the movie. The idea of a crazy stalker woman preying on younger females as surrogates for her daughter is something that could work and I think both Chloe and Isabelle Huppert do their best to pull this off. I just feel like the things they were told to do and say just didn't quite spark the right tone and there's too many illogical choices made throughout that force the audience to suspend disbelief in order to be fully entertained.

If I'm getting into specifics, I first want to start with Chloe. I think she's a great young actress with a lot of potential and I think she's on the right road to living up to her potential. Most of her career she's filled the role of teen actress with things like Hit-Girl in "Kick-A--" or other roles like "Hugo," the "Carrie" remake, and 2016's "The 5th Wave." Given that she was a teenager at the time, these fit her. But now she just celebrated her 22nd birthday and so she's trying to transition into more adult roles, hence her taking a lead role in the indie film "The Miseducation of Cameron Post" last year or "Greta" this year. And I wish her well. I think she can do it. I just think her character was written as a bit too naive. There are so many signs that she should turn tail and run, but she never picks up on them until Greta starts calling and texting her non-stop or follows her around the city. Even then, she feels a bit spacey as all she can come up with is to have people keep calling the police. Given that all of the police are written as unhelpful morons, this continuing to be Chloe's only solution became a bit frustrating. Chloe also looked a bit uninterested in the role throughout the movie, but the more I thought about it, the more I think it was the direction she was given. 

As far as Isabelle Huppert's character of Greta, I think Huppert had a fun time with this role... when she was given stuff to do. For most of the film, I think she was told to be as nice and innocent as possible, thus I had a hard time being scared of her. Most of the setup for her character was done when she was off camera with all the calls and text messages she was sending as well as what other characters were telling Chloe about her. But when she was on screen, she wasn't that intimidating. She was just a nice lady. Then the music kept telling me that I should be scared of her when it sounded ominous and mysterious, but she hadn't done anything wrong up to this point while she was on camera, so I started to get upset at the score trying to trick me into feeling emotions that the movie hadn't yet made me feel. The sound design and score is absolutely essentially, especially in horrors and thrillers. But it should be used as a means to support and build on the emotions that the movie has already set up with a good story and solid characters. If the movie tries to force the emotions by using sound, then they have things backwards. That's the problem that a lot of cheap horror films have as they think loud noises is how you're supposed to scare the audience.

The other thing that's especially essential for a thriller is the element of realism. The more real the scenario feels, the more the audience can become invested in what's going on. If I have to continue to suspend my disbelief in order for the movie to work, that's a problem. So the fact that the movie set up Chloe's character as extremely dumb and naive was frustrating because she didn't act in a way that most girls in their early 20's would act. Another big flaw here is that Greta became nearly superhuman with her stalking abilities, being everywhere that the plot needed her to be in order for her to seem intimidating, which got to be a bit ridiculous. I brought up the police before, but while I'm in a mood of talking about moments where the movie forced me to suspend disbelief, I might as well bring them up again. If a young woman calls the police and tells them that she is being stalked, I had a hard time seeing them acting so extremely unhelpful as they were. They're not even going to keep tabs on the situation or look into it at all? Finally, and this is where I'm getting into spoiler range a bit, but when Chloe finally gets herself into trouble, it becomes way too hard for our other characters to track Greta down. It seems like they should've found her immediately.

If it seems like I've been doing a whole lot of complaining, it's because I saw potential in this movie. Granted, no one has been able to consistently pull off thrillers in the same way Hitchcock did, but I think there's plenty of directors out there that come awfully close. Give this premise to a David Fincher or maybe even Jordan Peele and this transforms into an excellent thriller. That said, I did mention earlier that there are good things in this movie, but the problem is most of these things took place in the final act, which puts me in a bit of a bind regarding this review. But given that I don't think anyone really cares about this movie. It made no money, which usually means most people won't even care to read this review. So I'm going to treat this like a journal entry and throw some thoughts down just for the sake of getting them out of my head. If I'm wrong and you are reading this review and might even be interesting in seeing this movie, and you want everything to remain a surprise, now is your queue to close out and come back later. The movie may have taken a long time to get there, but it did eventually become the movie that I wanted it to become. I was forced onto the edge of my seat, having no idea how this was going to turn out, which I appreciated.

So here we are. The final act of the movie. I won't spoil the full resolution, but eventually Greta manages to drug and kidnap Chloe, locking her up in a box inside of a locked up room, that's hidden behind the piano in Greta's home. Even though Chloe looked disinterested in the movie and overly naive for the first two-thirds of the movie, she kicked it into full gear when she became the kidnapped victim. She showed a ton of emotion and was even as smart as she could be, given the situation. Coincidentally, this was also the part of the movie where Isabelle Huppert as Greta was finally given something to do and she delivered a pure psychotic role that had me terrified. Chloe tried to escape and fight back, but Greta was just too smart and too powerful. She's not even phased when Chloe chops off her finger with a cookie cutter, which is literally the only reason the movie is rated R. No other graphic violence, no strong language, and no sex or nudity. Just a severed finger. But anyways, Chloe becomes trapped and loses hope and I felt bad for her. Greta becomes completely psychotic and I bought it. And since her friend and father were too dumb to figure out where she was, I had no idea how Chloe was going to get herself out of this predicament, if at all.

All that said, a solid finale didn't excuse a poorly executed film for the first two-thirds of it. It just made me frustrated that we didn't get to that point sooner. Had Chloe been trapped in Greta's house closer to the beginning of the second, or maybe even as a part of the first, I think this whole movie would've been excellent. It could've been comparable to the thriller "Don't Breathe," which was a solid movie involving a group of kids who got trapped in an old psychotic blind man's house with no means of escaping. But as is, the finale was still good enough for me to give this movie a pass. And the first two-thirds of the movie wasn't completely cringe-worthy or awful. I just saw the potential of what this could become with better writing and proper direction, so it was more frustrating rather than outright bad because I wanted to love this movie, but I found myself not being able to love it as much as I wanted to. But still, if you're curious enough about this movie to check it out, I'd give it the green light. There's a lot of people who hated this movie, but also a lot of people who loved this movie. I kinda did a lot of both. It has a solid premise, solid acting by our leads when they were given their moments to shine, and a solid ending. As a whole, I'll give "Greta" a 7/10.