Greta (2019)

Neil Jordan has directed films of genuine consequence, which makes his decision to spend a late-career chapter on a stalker thriller about a lost handbag either a lark or a cry for help. The premise is sturdy B-movie stock: a young waitress named Frances returns a purse to a lonely French widow, accepts a cup of coffee, and gradually discovers that her new friend keeps a closet full of identical handbags, each tagged with a name and a phone number. From there the film proceeds with the grim efficiency of a wind-up toy, and Jordan directs it with a straight face and a taste for velvet menace.

The film belongs to Isabelle Huppert, who plays Greta as a woman composed entirely of surface and appetite, and to Chloe Grace Moretz, who spends much of the running time being drugged, bound, or instructed in Hungarian. It is a two-hander, and a female friendship curdles into something predatory. That is as far as the film's social analysis extends. No thesis is offered about patriarchy, no economic reading of the widow's motives, no environmental subtext, no argument about bodies or minds or history. The supporting cast is diverse in a way the screenplay never notices, which is either a quiet grace or plain indifference. We lean toward indifference.

The film does have camp, a severed finger, a dead dog, a private investigator with a syringe in his neck, and a final shot of a toy chest that rattles. It wants to thrill, not to instruct, and on that modest contract it delivers. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no moral instruction of any kind. Whether that constitutes artistic integrity or merely an absence of ideas is a question the film declines to answer. It just closes the lid.