While riding home on the subway train, Frances (Chloe Grace Moretz) finds a fancy black handbag on an empty seat. When her roommate, Erica (Maika Monroe), dumps the contents on the counter and rifles through the wallet, Frances refuses to keep the money. “Where I come from, it’s not what we do,” she insists. Instead, Frances returns the handbag, money and all, to its owner, a lonely older woman named Greta (Isabelle Huppert).
A suspenseful thriller, Greta draws from an almost primal fear that good deeds, kindness itself, leaves us vulnerable to harm. Greta is mother’s warning about going with strangers. The film plays on the anxiety that behind every smile lurks a sociopath. Like a slew of urban vengeance psycho-killer films dating back to the 1970s, Greta insists that the bureaucracy of contemporary society is incapable of restraining pure evil (or psychosis if you prefer to medicalize malice).
Perhaps, bereft from the recent death of her mother, Frances is unconsciously seeking a surrogate in Greta—as Erica scornfully asserts. However, Greta’s Old World cosmopolitanism might appeal in any circumstance to Frances, bookish and marginal on the cosmo-drinking Manhattan party circuit Erica calls home.
Draped in genteel poverty and drenched in Romanticism, Greta lives alone at the end of a courtyard like the one in Rear Window (not the film’s only Hitchcock touch). She plays melancholy etudes on her piano and Edith Piaf on her turntable; she is surrounded by mementos and photographs of a world lost to her. She seems endearingly hapless when Frances helps her with her cellphone. But in a quick scene, set to ominous music, Greta skillfully navigates the web for information on Frances. She’s up to something and it’s not good.
Before long Frances is followed by Greta with an almost supernatural persistence. She is the spectral figure standing for hours in the street across from the bistro where Frances serves tables. Spooked, she calls a cop who tells her that Greta is within her rights. “Ignore her, she just wants your attention,” the officer says. But the mobile calls keep coming and Greta slips into Frances’ building. A restraining order? It will take months. The stalker scenes are accompanied by the music of slashing, tearing strings.
“Frances, if you’d only let me explain,” runs one of Greta’s many voice messages. I’ve been in the well of loneliness. We were meant for love, Frances.” Well of Loneliness was the archetypal 1928 lesbian novel by Britain’s Radclyffe Hall, but if sex is on Greta’s mind, it is thoroughly sublimated under an icky blanket of bad motherly love.
Writer-director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) is an old hand at twisty plot lines. In Greta, they turn and they twist before taking another turn. The story grows preposterous but holds attention—and draws us to the edge of our seats—through Moretz’s performance as an innocent confronted by unspeakable horror and Huppert, whose benign mask cracks into the emotionally shriveled visage of a Brothers Grimm wicked witch. Jordan maintains a dark, uneasy atmosphere of filtered sunlight and mirrored surfaces reflecting into eternity. Fear of confinement, emotional and literal, suffuses the picture. And—here’s a twist—the cynical party girl Erica is the only character who understands what to do when faced with the manipulative Greta.
