American Psycho

Mary Harron, USA/Canada, 2000, 102 minutes

“Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?”

It is 1987. Patrick Bateman is a young, wealthy, successful Wall Street banker. He has a beautiful apartment, an attractive girlfriend, a designer wardrobe, and is at the peak of physical fitness. To everyone in the outside world he appears to be entirely normal. However, whilst his work colleagues are making multi-million dollar deals in Mergers and Acquisitions, Bateman prefers to make his own killings in Murders and Executions…

American Psycho is based upon the ultra-controversial novel of the same name by Bret Easton Ellis, depicting the chilling life of an insane man with a distinct lack of emotion and a thirst for blood. Although the film’s content pales in comparison to the gratuitously explicit bloodshed of the book, this remains an intensely dark, albeit sometimes comic psychological thriller. The well-adapted script successfully replicates the satirical elements of Ellis’ original story, adding an entertaining social commentary on the era of 80’s Wall Street yuppies – witness the hilarious “business card comparison”, or Bateman’s detailed analysis of Huey Lewis’s music before chopping a man’s head off. It is scenes like these that differentiate American Psycho from the vast majority of modern serial killer movies and make it a truly memorable experience.

The film features a range of excellent supporting actors, including Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto and Reese Witherspoon, but it is Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman that steals the show. His performance is consistently excellent, managing to make a psychotic killer seem both incredibly likeable and disturbingly scary, often in the same scene. Mary Harron’s direction is also of a high standard and the 80’s soundtrack is superb – this is definitely a film you must see.

And now… I have to return some videotapes…

Review by Iain Jackson
Written for EUFS Programme Spring 2004