American Psycho 2000

I honestly was not fully paying attention at the start. It only really grabbed me when Willem Dafoe showed up and during the threesome scene. Those moments pulled me back in. For me, Patrick Bateman is clearly a control freak and a narcissist. Everything about him is calculated, from his routines to how he presents himself. It feels like he is constantly trying to maintain a perfect image while something darker is hiding underneath. I also noticed how his face is often lit on one side while the other half falls into shadow. That visual choice really highlights his duality. One side is the polished, successful man, while the other side hides his violent and unstable nature. Christian Bale is great here. The performance feels like watching Batman slowly turn into the Joker. There is that same discipline and control, but twisted into something disturbing and unpredictable. While watching it, I kept finding some things absurd. How does no one hear a chainsaw in an apartment building? How do the dead bodies not start to smell? How were the cops not able to connect the serial killings? And how can a gun somehow make two police cars explode like that? The world itself feels off. They are about showing how detached he is from the real world. So it starts to feel more like a distorted perspective of someone losing grip on reality.