Greta (2019) - Movie Review

When crafting a story, there is always that feeling that there is more that can be done with the premise. No story is capable of exploring every single facet that it brushes against, and when dealing with something as intensive as cinema, the smaller details require as much preparation as humanly possible.

I’ve covered a few movies in the past that felt like they were trying to make statements on anything and everything connected to its core idea, but movies feeling cluttered doesn’t get a gut rejection from me as a critic. All I really ask is that, if something is going to be brought up on-screen, it should at least be given enough weight that it makes sense why it is being highlighted. For a good example of this, there’s last year’s Suspiria, which not only dealt with a whole slew of different ideas but managed to give all of them room to breathe so it all made sense. For a bad example of this, we have today’s Chloë Grace-Moretz feature.

Let’s get into the basics of this one first, that being its place as a bit of psycho-thrill cinema. The main premise regarding the titular character who bonds with the lead but turns out to not be what she appears on the surface is all well and good, and it definitely helps that the acting is good enough to shoulder the story. However, this is a situation where that ends up highlighting its own set of problems, as it feels like the actors are doing the best they can with subpar material. Chloë is perfectly fine in the captive role, but she never really goes beyond that framework. She exists as the story requires her to, which largely consists of being terrorised and needing to learn that she shouldn’t be so trusting of strangers. Bit rich coming from a product that itself requires a certain amount of trust from the audience that it won’t turn sour after we’ve already invested time and money into it, but if that was this film’s only problem, I wouldn’t have minded that much.

From there, we have Isabelle Huppert in the title role, who feels perpetually stuck between two very different kinds of psychological villains. At times, she has the quiet, tortured air that made her turn in The Piano Teacher so enthralling, and at others, she feels one homemade make-up job away from being in a remake of Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? As much as that brand of psycho-biddy thrills isn’t exactly being in vogue at the moment, for a modern take on that same concept of the crazed older female antagonist, it could have worked… but again, the writing just isn’t there. There’s some notions of grieving and applying the ‘we’ll get you a new dog’ mentality to attempts to replace the people we’ve lost, but they end up buried underneath the varying layers of camp that keep this from being as creepy as it could have been.

Yeah, it’s a recurring thing where genuinely talented people are brought into this production, but none of them manage to raise the overall quality as much as they should. Javier Navarrete’s work with the soundtrack definitely wrings the tension out of his piano-heavy orchestrations, and Seamus McGarvey’s camera work help add to the feeling of helplessness that is enforced by the script’s attempts to force the plot down a specific direction. You’ve seen this before, where the main character in a scary movie tries to get outside help but no-one is able to provide it, save for those closest to them.

Admittedly, said help comes from Maika Monroe as her roommate, who comes across as the most genuinely complex character here, but their friendship never clicks in the right way that makes the plot turns (which range from the outright stupid, like her advice on how to get rid of Greta, to the boringly contrived, like her role in the finale) feel worthwhile.

It all just falls short, primarily because amidst all the different tones and ideas that it tries to grasp, the main intent of the whole thing never really comes into focus. And what’s worse is that the ideas that come the closest to the foreground are ones that have been done much better in many other films. As I’ve said in past, I care more about competence than originality; I’d rather watch an old story told well than a new story told poorly. This film, in spite of the talent involved both in front of and behind the camera, manages a few scattered moments of true chill but never comes together into a cohesive whole. And as a result of that, it’s quite difficult to recommend since it’s not even that clear what the film was trying to do in the first place.