American Psycho Review

Mary Harron's adaptation solves a book most people thought unfilmable by treating its violence as one more status object, no more real than the business cards. Bale's Patrick Bateman is built from tiny mechanical adjustments: the held smile, the vowels pitched slightly too far forward, the way he narrates a skincare routine with the cadence of a man reading his own eulogy.

The business card scene is the best sustained comic acting of its decade, because every man at that table plays the stakes as mortal. Andrzej Sekula shoots the apartments and restaurants in cold whites and glass so that blood registers as a design flaw. Chloe Sevigny gives Jean a real interior life, which the film badly needs for its single moment of genuine jeopardy.

The last act is where it slips. Once Bateman is running down corridors with a chainsaw, the satire loosens into farce, and the closing ambiguity about whether any of it happened is less interesting than the film believes, since the answer changes nothing about the argument. Willem Dafoe's detective is underused as well. Yet the Huey Lewis monologue, performed in a raincoat with an axe held behind his back, is perfectly calibrated.