“This is the bed of lies!!!!” Trust me, this movie is worth seeing just for that line. You will thank me later.
This movie is awful and I am recommending the hell out of it. I may not like a lot of the movies that I see lately, but there are two kinds of bad movies: ones that make me angry and ones that make me laugh. Greta falls firmly into the second category. I laughed my ass off during this movie, as did the friends that I had with me. Some people walked out of the theater, but they missed out. This is stupid. Blissfully, over-the-top stupid.
Chloë Grace Moretz plays Frances, a young waitress living in what’s clearly meant to be Brooklyn by the relentless hipster douchebagery on display (it was actually filmed in Ireland). One day she finds a lost purse on the subway and returns it to its owner, a lonely middle-aged woman played by Isabelle Huppert. They become friends and yada yada yada it turns out that Huppert is crazy and plants purses around the city in hopes that a young girl will return it to her and she can take them prisoner. This plan requires that people will A. return the purse to her and B. they don’t just mail it to her and C. only young, naïve girls with mommy issues will find the purses. But it seems to work, so fuck it.
I thought that this would be a throwback to 90s stalker thrillers like Poison Ivy, Fear, The Crush, etc. And it is that, just, well, dumber. The biggest problem here, and what makes this movie goddamn hilarious, is how non-threatening the villain is. Huppert is a good actress and she tries her damndest to make this work. But, at the end of the day, she is an unarmed 65-year-old woman. She isn’t imposing in the least and is only able to abuse Frances and take her hostage because Frances allows it. You know what I would do if an unarmed middle-aged woman told me that I wasn’t allowed to leave her house? I would fucking leave her house. Really, just walk out the front goddamn door. There is really very little stopping you. I’m a man and I know that alters the dynamic, but Frances is clearly bigger and more physically capable that her captor. I spent half this freaking movie yelling “just fucking punch her” and “walk out the goddamn door!” Oh the door is locked? Break one of the hundred fucking windows and just fucking leave! I get that thrillers often require suspension of disbelief and I try to go along with such things, but this plays like a comedy skit with how it draws attention to just how silly this entire scenario is.
There is also an inherent problem with the older woman-younger woman stalker dynamic in this film. Quite simply, there is much to do with it. In Fear, the threat is clear because it’s a psychotic male going after a girl and her family. In something like Poison Ivy or The Crush, its an escalating scenario of a younger girl ruining a man’s life while he tries to figure out a way out of it before it escalates to violence. But here, there isn’t much to do with this relationship and the movie seems to know it. There is nothing to manipulate and nothing to inspire any sense of dread. It just feels like Chloë Grace Moretz’s grandmother got drunk and was tired of her shit. That’s not a thriller, that’s a comedy.
What really makes this movie stands out, though, is Huppert’s performance. This movie is just full of moments that I will cherish. From spitting in Frances’ hair to following her roommate like a ninja down the street only to somehow appear on the same bus as her like some sort of wizard, this woman is just great. I am going to be quoting the line “This is the bed of lies!!!!” at least twice a week for the foreseeable future, context be damned. Seriously, totally makes the movie worth it.
If you fondly remember 90s thrillers, then, um, here is a really stupid one. More importantly, I could see this having a cult following for how freaking ridiculous it is. Between this, Replicas and Serenity, 2019 is shaping up to be quite a year for producing future content for Mystery Science Theater episodes. Of those three, I’m giving the edge to Greta, though, because unintentional comedy is sometimes the best comedy.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_(2018_film)#/media/File:Greta_poster.jpeg
