Monday, December 05, 2016

Be My Cat: A Film for Anne—Romanian Found Footage

It is nice to see press photos of this particular cast at their film’s premiere, because this is one exercise in found footage that could easily spawn it-was-real urban legends. Partly it is the film’s Romanian origins, but the way its creepy protagonist uses the horror-movie-in-production excuse to get away with murder most deviant is just unsettlingly believable. Plus, there are pronounced echoes of John Hinckley reborn in the unhinged filmmaker desperately trying to impress Hollywood movie-star Anne Hathaway with the proof-of-concept footage that makes up Adrian Ţofei’s Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (trailer here), releasing tonight on Vimeo VOD, from Artsploitation.

It is hard to imagine anyone getting obsessed with Hathaway based on her most recent releases (seriously, any partisans for The Intern, Alice through the Looking Glass, or Don Peyote?), but Adrian the filmmaker has a thing about cats—and she played Cat Woman in The Dark Knight Rises. His script seems to be about a psycho who abducts a woman for the sake of making her his cat-suited sex slave—exactly the sort of role Anne Hathaway is surely eager to play.

Needless to say, Adrian will need one or two replacement actresses as his grubby shoot continues, but frankly the mental games he plays with the unwitting women are arguably more disturbing than the inevitable bloodshed. Frankly, most of the first two acts we have seen before, except Ţofei’s scenes are maybe even crueler. However, the cat-and-mouse give-and-take of the third act is an electric sequence that pretty much redeems the entire film.

Alexandra Stroe is terrific as her namesake actress, who is utterly believable and compelling stalling for time and winning Adrian’s trust. Ţofei too is eerily credible playing a psychotic version of himself, who loses sight of the boundaries between his own persona and his on-camera character. We slowly discover just how he became so damaged, but we never really empathize with him.

So, the obvious question is just what does Anne Hathaway have to say for herself after inspiring all this mayhem? Ţofei would also like to know, so he’s started this online petition to have Be My Cat delivered to her manager. Good luck with that. If she does start watching it, Hathaway (or anyone else for that matter), should keep in mind there is a lot of rough stuff to plow through, but it pays off at the end. Recommended for hardcore found footage horror fans only, Be My Cat: A Film for Anne launches tonight (12/5) on Vimeo with a DVD and wider VOD release to follow in January, from Artsploitation.