"Cat Person" - Review

Margot (Emilia Jones) works at a cinema, and bumps into a semi-regular customer named Robert (Nicholas Braun), and after some initial awkwardness, gives him her number. Her more cynical friend Taylor (Geraldine Viswanathan) has doubts, but they start dating, and going through the awkward trials and tribulations of modern dating.

Jones (who played Alice in "Utopia"... huh) is excellent, playing Margot as unsure and awkward and trying her best to navigate this relationship, with little dream sequences and conversations with herself. There are lots of relatable parts to her, and little moments and touches which throw you into her headspace, including a rather well-done sex scene.
But for me personally, it was the performance of Braun which really stood out: he filled it with little touches like his angry shaking off of a hand at his shuolder when opening a door, his awkward pauses or silences during conversations, his somewhat uncomfortable initial conversations with Margot at the start. He managed to be full of red flags without being overtly, comically sinister, and the whole film became a death by a thousand cuts: he's not abusive or violent, he's just a bit weird and mismatched, but the movie has you thinking that Margot is maybe taking this a bit too far (up until a rather unforgivable point). The makers make EXCELLENT use of the fact that Braun is 6 foot fucking 7. But even after the inevtiable break up, and the crossing of the line from Robert, the film takes pains to have it be relatively realistic in its depictions of break ups and behaviours: was Margot being too naive or was her desperate thrust for politeness and manners going too far? It's a murky, grey, uncomfortable film about the awkwardness of romance.
However.
Tonally, it stumbles in a few places as it doesn't know what it wants to be: is it a wacky dark comedy (where the characters huddle around Margot and shuffle out of the restaurant comically) with quick-talking sassy friend Taylor dishing out sick burns and running away with the entire movie (as Viswanathan is wont to do!) and imagined sequences of wackier murders; or is it a dark thriller with a stalker and a woman's descent into paranoia and danger? The tonal shifts can be jarring. One moment we are watching a toe-curling attempt to appease her step father, the next there is a sequence of her up all night, wondering if she realy did see Robert waiting outside...
It yo yos between these things, and whilst Viswanathan is incredibly funny, it threatens to derail proceedings.
The finale will be controversial, but I rather like it: there's some great payoff to previous moments and recontextualising of her previous assumptions and fears, and some actually rather valid points raised by Robert about all of the behaviour up until this point. It risks "both sidesing" the issue, but I think it balances it relatively well, though after "Bottoms" I am not sure I can accuse any finale of being "out there".