Greta

Isabelle Huppert goes gonzo bonkers in director Neil Jordan’s latest—a silly, standard psycho stalker cinematic run-through made somewhat fun by Huppert’s commitment to nuttiness and costar Chloe Grace Moretz’s excellence at playing freaked out. Moretz is Frances, a young woman living in New York City with her best friend Erica (Maika Monroe). Frances, still dealing with the loss of her mother, finds somebody’s handbag on the subway and decides to return it to its owner. The owner is Greta (Huppert), a piano playing, solitary French woman who immediately invites Frances into her life, and they develop a fast mother/daughter bond. Greta has a daughter of her own, but she lives in Paris, so Frances fills a void. Greta provides the motherly friendship Frances craves. Erica cries weird about the whole relationship, but Frances persists, even helping Greta adopt a dog, and opting to hang with Greta instead of friends her own age. This is a horror-thriller, so it’s fairly obvious going into the theater that the Greta connection isn’t going to work out for the good. The cards are flipped early in the movie, and Greta reveals herself as a real kook, and the mother/daughter bonding goes south super-fast, devolving into Greta going into full stalker mode. The plotting is similar to other stalker films like Single White Female and One Hour Photo.