American Psycho

A film set in New York at the end of the 1980s. Patrick Bateman works in investment banking. He follows a long grooming routine in the morning and explains it in detail in voice-over. Nobody at his firm knows anyone. They all wear similar suits, go to similar restaurants and constantly mix up each other's names. There is a scene with business cards. The men compare the stock and the typeface of their cards and Bateman sweats. From there the film moves to the killings. A colleague, a homeless man, a woman; all of them cold and all of them detailed. What the narrative is interested in is not violence but invisibility: whatever Bateman does he is not noticed; he confesses and nobody listens. The ending is deliberately unresolved. Whether any of it happened is not settled, and the narrative leaves that not as a puzzle but as a conclusion. The speeches about music are its best known sections; the man analyses the pop albums of the period in earnest while committing murder. The source is Bret Easton Ellis's novel. The book met a hard reaction on publication and the adaptation was seen as a problem for years. The film was directed by a woman who also wrote the screenplay, and that, alongside the criticism of the book's misogyny, changed the tone of the narrative. The studio wanted a different actor in the lead; the director insisted and Christian Bale stayed. Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Reese Witherspoon and Chloë Sevigny are in the cast. Mary Harron directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes black comedy and criticism of a period. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot take the violence; the film delivers it in a comic tone, which is more disturbing.