American Psycho
The Funniest Film About Nothing Being Wrong
Crime/Comedy ‧ 102 minutes ‧ R ‧ 2000 ‧ 5 min read
"I have to return some videotapes."
The first thing to understand about American Psycho is that it is a comedy. Not dark comedy in the way people usually mean when they want to sound serious about something. It is genuinely, wickedly funny, and the film works because Mary Harron never lets you forget that. Patrick Bateman is not a monster hiding beneath a suit. He is a void wearing one, and the horror of the film comes entirely from how nobody around him is different enough to notice.
Christian Bale's performance is the engine of the whole thing. Bale plays vacancy like a melody. Every smile is a mask that barely holds, and every monologue about skincare and music is perfect bait for how seriously Bateman takes himself. The business card scene is one of the funniest moments in cinema from that decade precisely because Bale treats it with the gravity of a man facing a genuine crisis. His colleagues are doing the same thing. That is the joke. Reese Witherspoon and Chloë Sevigny round out the world around him, each of them playing characters who are in their own ways just as absorbed by surface as Patrick is.
The early violence mostly stays off screen or arrives in pieces, and that restraint is the gag and the dread simultaneously. The comedy walks in first and holds the door open. Early cutaways make the later, more explicit violence feel like fantasy leaking out rather than confirmed reality. The film never asks you to settle the question of whether any of it happened. What matters is that nobody would care either way, and that indifference is the thesis.
What Harron gets right is the refusal to explain. Is any of it real? The film is not interested in settling that question. What matters is that nobody cares either way, and that indifference is the thesis. Patrick could confess to anything and be absorbed by the ambient noise of New York wealth without leaving a trace. The system is not horrified by him. The system built him, dressed him, and gave him business cards with the right font.
The weakness is pacing. The middle section loses momentum in places, and a few sequences feel like they are repeating a point the film already made ten minutes earlier. Some of the repetition is intentional, mirroring the numbing sameness of Bateman's world, but there are stretches where the joke overstays itself. The film is at its best when it is moving, and at its least interesting when it slows down to admire its own surface.
The ending earns it. The confession dissolves. Nobody is coming. The diary closes on nothing. American Psycho gets a 4 out of 5. It is sharper than most films twice its length, and Bale turns what could have been a gimmick performance into something genuinely unsettling. The joke is on everyone. Including the audience. Including the sigma edit crowd on TikTok who missed the entire point and made it their personality anyway.
(The business card scene deserved its own Academy Award category.)
