American Psycho

Herald rating: * * * *

Cast: Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Reese Witherspoon, Samantha Mathis, Chloe Sevigny

Director: Mary Harron

Rating: R18 (violence, offensive language, sex)

Running time: 101 mins

Opens: Thursday at Rialto, Village Queen St, Hoyts Wairau Park

Review: Peter Calder

Bret Easton Ellis' controversially bloodsoaked 1991 novel, which is the basis of this stylish piece of comic horror, was a work of its time, a sometimes distastefully detailed slasher epic which imparted a homicidally nasty spin to the ideas canvassed in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities.

A screen version more than a decade after the 1980s, which it sought to dissect, may seem dated (although the new millennium's dotcom zillionaires are the descendants of the 80s' yuppies) but director Harron isn't interested in adaptation so much as in variations on a theme.

Patrick Bateman has cinematic ancestors (the name echoes that of Norman Bates in Hitchcock's horror classic Psycho and Christian Bale's eerie embodiment underlines the fact) but he's also the dark flipside to Bonfire's Sherman McCoy (he even works for a firm named, like McCoy's, Pierce and Pierce, though the name is more sharply apt here given Bateman's fondness for blades).

Harron and co-writer Guinevere Turner have taken a filleting knife to Ellis' story, creating a sleek and muscled work with a far lower body count, a film as funny as it is chilling and one which replaces the gleeful explicitness of its source with an often hideous suggestiveness.

Bateman and his colleagues in "mergers and acquisitions" (Bateman, in one of the film's many black jokes, calls it "murders and executions") on Wall Street are constantly engaged in a late-century equivalent of plumage display.

They lunch at impossibly expensive restaurants, even when they're not hungry - they just want to be seen in establishments where no one can get a table - and boastfully compare their business-card typefaces and textures.

This is a world where appearances are everything and one where, Bateman tells us, "I just want to fit in." But it soon becomes clear that he doesn't.

The seductive camera of photographer Andrzej Sekula, who shot Pulp Fiction, leads us into the life of a man who spends thousands on cosmetics but can distinguish in himself "not a single identifiable human emotion." Oh, and on his time off, he kills people. Violently.

Throughout, Harron avoids the slasher-movie formulas and deftly plays with the idea that Bateman's excesses (which involve among other things a stainless steel axe and a chainsaw) may simply manifest the soul-crushed rage of the conformist executive.

It's all wickedly, gleamingly stylish fun, a kind of post-modern Grand Guignol which is driven by an extraordinary performance by Bale (the schoolboy cherub from Spielberg's Empire of the Sun is unrecognisably pumped up).

Witherspoon, Mathis and Sevigny are, in various ways, great targets for the killer, and Dafoe is cleverly cast against type, a genial, ambling detective on the murderer's trail. Wicked fun.