American Psycho – REVIEW – Christian Bale, Justin Theroux, Josh Lucas

„I simply am not there,’ says Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale – Out of the Furnace, American Hustle) early in Mary Harron’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial novel. It’s an oddly chilling statement from a truly terrifying character who is the embodiment of the shallow materialism that defined the 1980s. Bateman operates in a society in which the people are interchangeable and are repeatedly mistaken for one another; he obsesses over business cards, designer suits, immaculate grooming – all the things we’re told aren’t important to a happy, healthy lifestyle. His life is empty, and he’s an empty vessel, capable of feeling only ‘greed and disgust.’

This anonymity of characters is what enables Bateman to pull off a series of murders with apparently absurd ease. The world is too self-absorbed to notice his atrocities. It’s a world in which a naked man wielding a chainsaw can chase a screaming prostitute through apartment corridors without attracting the curiosity of its residents, and can leave a bloody trail in the marble foyer of his plush apartment building as he drags another victim – a work colleague who has displeased him – past a security guard to the boot of a waiting taxi cab. But there’s a price to pay for this apparent impunity and, as Bateman confesses, his mask of sanity is about to slip.