American Psycho

20001 hour 42 minsREnglish

HorroRated verdict

Highly Recommended

2000sPsychologicalSerial KillerDark ComedySatire

Directed by: Mary Harron
Written by: Bret Easton Ellis
Produced by: Edward R. Pressman, Chris Hanley, Edward R. Pressman, Chris Hanley, and Christian Halsey Solomon

Collections

Psychological Serial Killer Dark Comedy Slashers Urban Horror Cult Classics

Why it’s HorroRated

Mary Harron made the only version of this material that could work on screen by keeping the camera at Bateman's distance rather than inside his psychology, and that restraint is what makes it so unsettling. Christian Bale's performance is one of the great horror acting jobs of the decade — surface-perfect, deeply hollow, and funny in ways that make you uncomfortable for laughing. The 1980s Wall Street setting functions as its own horror environment, a world where identity is entirely performance and violence is the only authentic impulse. It holds up as satire, as horror, and as a character study simultaneously, which very few films manage.

Synopsis

Patrick Bateman moves through the upper echelon of 1980s New York with an internal monologue that makes clear he is not the person his colleagues think they know. Mary Harron's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel keeps the ambiguity intact: whether Bateman's violence is real or fantasy is deliberately unresolved, and that uncertainty is the film's sharpest instrument. Christian Bale's performance operates on multiple frequencies at once, a man performing normalcy so precisely that the performance itself becomes the horror. The satire and the slasher are inseparable here, which is exactly how Ellis intended it.