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.
