American Psycho film review

certificate_18

AMERICAN PSYCHO

In adapting one of the most controversial novels of the last decade to the screen, Mary Harron has shifted the focus away from the gore and bloodshed and has concentrated on Brett Easton Ellis's pithy commentary on 80s materialism and greed, nudging the picture towards the realms of black comedy.

At its centre is handsome yuppie Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale), a coke-snorting, power-hungry social climber who judges success by the clothes people wear, the places they eat, and the richness of the paper in their business cards. Possessions and wealth mean more to him than life itself. He is a paragon of conformity in an amoral society where to conform it to be amoral.

Patrick treats his body like a temple. Several hundred ab crunches every morning, push ups, a rigorous regime of exfoliating, moisturising and massaging to ensure his greatest asset - his face - is the picture of health. Anything and everything to allow him to fit in; to be part of the game.

But all the while, he harbours dark, disturbing thoughts about his business rivals. How he would like to give them a taste of his pain; his insecurity.

Sooner or later, you just know his murderous fantasies will stray from his unconscious into the real world.

Bale looks sensational and digs deep within himself to capture the melancholy and madness of a designer label-clad monster driven by his inner demons. There's a terrific energy and desperation to his performance, accentuated by a chilling, almost emotionless voiceover which reveals his innermost thoughts: "I had all the characteristics of a human being - flesh, blood, skin, hair - but my depersonalisation was so intense that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated; the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure..."

Chloe Sevigny, playing Patrick's secretary, represents the sole voice of compassion and humanity in the whole film and as such is the person we most identify with in this nightmare world.

Stylistically, the film is exudes an eerie cleanliness and Harron directs with flair and courage, implying violence and showing the terrible aftermath, leaving us to fill in the gaps.

Like the book, the film doesn't always know what it is trying to satirise, but for the most part it hits its targets, striking the right queasy balance between horror and humour, so that while we recoil at Patrick's heinous crimes, we find ourselves compelled to laugh at him.