Based on animated sex robot videoKristen Roupenian's popular New Yorkershort storyfrom 2017, Susanna Fogel's romantic drama/dark comedy Cat Personis among the most tonally and visually indecisive films from this year's festival scene. After its debut at Sundance in January, the movie received what the deputy CEO of Canal+ Group (the parent company of producers Studio Canal) called"catastrophic offers" from distributors. It isn't quite the disaster this leaked kerfuffle might've made it seem, but it's so often plain in its telling, and so eventually off-kilter in the way it adapts the story's conclusion, that it remains a far cry from entertaining or incisive.

Like the short it's based on, Cat Personfollows movie theater cashier and college sophomore Margot (Emilia Jones) on her incredibly awkward date with Robert (Nicholas Braun), an older man who proves disappointing and insecure despite his outward sweetness. But where Roupenian's writing sharply unearthed the characters' interiority — real in the case of protagonist Margot, imagined in Robert's — Fogel and screenwriter Michelle Ashford struggle to effectively externalize the many themes their adaptation keeps gesturing towards, whether that's the landmines women have to navigate while dating or simply the discomfort of ambiguity.

What is Cat Person about?

Whatever Cat Person's flaws — and it has many — the film certainly can't be accused of lacking ambition. It opens with on-screen text of one the most famous quotes on differing gender experiences, from The Handmaid's Taleauthor Margaret Atwood: "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." It uses this disconnect in perception as its framing device, and attempts to filter the ensuing events through Margot's perspective. The movie has no dearth of ideas, but the way it assembles them often lacks finesse and forethought. Individual scenes, usually focusing on Margot's anxieties about the world around her, feel disconnected from the larger whole.

Even before Robert enters her life, her POV occasionally strays into nightmarish territory akin to a slasher film, though not necessarily because she feels unsafe in a world designed for male convenience and comfort. For instance, she has a vision of a bloody hallway that has nothing to do with the preceding scene of her walking home alone at night and looking over her shoulder, but rather, extends from a seemingly unrelated story of her attempting to bring a dog into her dorm room, much to the chagrin of her RA.

There is at least one instance of this horror-adjacent tone working, in a scene invented for the movie in which Margot and Robert end up locked inside a small room (by accident, he claims). It's defined by a brief but piercing tension, and it's about the only time in Cat Personthat Margot's uncertainty about Robert's intentions feels truly terrifying, since she hasn't yet been able suss out whether he's as harmless as he seems. But for the most part, the film isn't willing to trade in these unknowns the way the short story is, despite much of its focus being on what Margot imagines Robert's life and personality to be.

The scenes in which she pictures these unknowns are amusing in spurts, and alternatingly disgust and arouse Margot, but neither her disgust nor arousal are given expressive cinematic form. Instead, they're usually commented on from a distance; in the case of the movie's successfully awkward sex scene, she imagines a physical double of herself watching her from afar, with whom she has an entire conversation. This is not, however, a depiction of an out-of-body experience per se, or of Margot feeling at an ashamed remove from her decisions. Rather, it's presented simply as a means to deliver internal monologues and punchlines — verbal references to mood, rather than aesthetic embodiments of it.

Sometimes, the movie's disconnects are minor — why does Margot's imagination feature a Wilhelm screamas an Easter egg when one of her only defining traits is disliking Star Wars? — but the bigger ones exacerbate its problems. By couching the story in Atwood's famous quote, and by shooting every space as a dark and dingy alley (even if it's a well-lit street), the film on one hand attempts to create a sense of mood and danger around Margot's experiences, yet there's a jovial quality to them when the movie switches gears and becomes outright comedic.

It's not that these two modes can't exist side by side; recent films like Chloe Domont's Fair Playand Kitty Green's upcoming The Royal Hoteldisplay immense tonal balance when it comes to similar experiences, concerning how women navigate male spaces daily. Rather, Cat Personcan't seem to blend them together into something cognitively dissonant. The delineation between its eerie and comedic scenes is, if anything, far too neat, a problem that stems from the way it's adapted.

How does Cat Person differ from the New Yorker short story?

While the short was no doubt more streamlined, the movie version tacks on a number of off-kilter elements that seldom mix with the story at hand. The first is that it gives Margot's roommate (Geraldine Viswanathan) an extended and repetitive subplot about female spaces online that's meant to mirror Margot's predicament, but it goes practically nowhere by the end. But more pertinently, the movie version extends the short story's chronology well beyond its original ending. By doing so, it seems to miss why its conclusion was so impactful in the first place, to the point of becoming a viral sensation.

The short's conclusion is a thematic denouement, bringing to the fore a previously uncertain aspect of Robert's perspective and — though not quite clarifying it — detailing it with an impactful enough words and intentions that it lands with a familiar thud. It's perhaps the only moment of real lucidity in the story as far as Robert is concerned. Up until that point, his identity feels shrouded, and he is only revealed through hints of aggression and insecurity that Margot is forced to read and interpret. Of course, a cinematic version of this is inherently different; where Roupenian's words made us privy to specific slivers of Robert, the camera is much more of an objective observer affording us a more complete view of his behavior and body language.

However, Fogel struggles to imbue this cinematic objectivity with a sense of the subjective. The shots themselves seldom feel like the result of Margot's point of view; they never enhance or highlight, through light or sound, any aspect of his form or personality. Of course, the camera needn't be subjective for a story like this to work, but its objectivity feels more accidental than intentional. The one truly subjective aspect of the film, Margot's dialogue about Robert — whether with herself or with her roommate over the phone, which functions as pseudo-voiceover — never departs from the images, but usually describes exactly what's on screen. It has no sense of implication or innuendo; the words neither complement or contradict the picture, so there's no whimsy or tension to their interplay. You could watch the film on mute, or you could close your eyes and have the exact same experience.

What about Cat Person's ending?

Perhaps worst of all is the way the movie version tacks on a goofy third act beyond the short's conclusion. It reads like a college slapstick comedy on paper, but it's meant to play out like an intimate thriller. It's a deeply confused and confusing extension that adds little to the story's ruminations on male insecurity as filtered through female imagination.

Instead, it makes thuddingly literal some of the short's most notable ambiguities — like the nature of its title, without giving too much away. This is also part of why casting Braun as Robert doesn't quite work. He's a more than capable performer, as seen on Succession, but he has a doe-eyed sincerity to him that prevents him from layering and hiding Robert's intentions behind specific lines, which Margot is supposed to have trouble interpreting. He's an actor who clarifies, rather than concealing.

This works for a show like Succession, with its documentary stylings and focus on scumbags who barely hide it, but it contradicts a story about unknowns and probing questions about intentions. If anything, it makes Margot seem kind of stupid for not being able to read the motivations Braun makes clear as day. Jones does a fine job as Margot, and she adequately adds a sense of fear and uncertainty to each of the character's glances, but again, the same problem arises in the process of having her act opposite a conception of Robert who lays it all out on the table.

This makes the film's protracted final act even stranger, by making Margot's protective and preventive actions against Robert feel downright mean; as Braun plays him, Robert's sincerity never seems to brush up against the darker implications of the source text. In effect, the movie inadvertently embodies his perspective, rather than hers. While it only occasionally envisions the fear women feel, according to Atwood's quote, it most definitely captures Robert's embarrassment, perhaps even more vividly.

At two hours in length, this extended postscript feels entirely excessive. It does little to help detail Margot's perspective or emotional world, and only serves to confuse it. The end result is a film that fundamentally misunderstands the subtler and more succinct dramatic elements of the original short story.

CatPersonopens in limited release Oct. 6.