Case Study: American Psycho

American Psycho is a thriller/drama/black comedy which was released on April 21st 2000 worldwide. It was directed by Mary Harron and based on the book written by Brett Easton Ellis, the screen play was also written by Harron. It started with a budget of $7 million and ended up with a gross of $34,266,564, so it made a huge profit! On IMDB is has a rating of 7.2/10 so it is quite highly rated. It was followed up with American Psycho 2 which did not get a very good reception as it was straight to video, it currently only has a review of 11% on the review website 'Rotten Tomatoes'.

Christian Bale stars as Patrick Bateman, he is the main character in the story and his days are spent working for his fathers company on Wall Street making a great deal of money and a popular man in the office. It's set in the 1980's and the soundtrack includes music such as Phil Collins and Huey Lewsi & The News; both popular musicians from the 80's.
However, as night decends over New York he becomes a blood thirsty murderer, killing people to climb up the social heriachy and eliminating any who he dislikes. The film is quite dark and most of the shots are a night or in badly lit bars and restaurants, this makes it more sinister as it conceals people from the full picture.

The film is set as an 18 age limit which is very appropriate; this movie has scenes of a sexual nature, foul language, murders and gore. In my opinion no one below the age of 15-16 should watch it as it’s quite an adult film, a very good one, but slightly disturbed in places. The film is mostly aimed at males because it has mainly male characters throughout, so is dominated by them, the women in it are either sex objects or just meaningless people filling out the story. Of course some women will like it, such as myself; I find the storyline quite interesting and in places it is just so ridiculous it makes me laugh a little. Also, on the graphs of the ratings it shows that 72,908 men voted the film compared to the 11,270 women, so there is a very significant different there. A majority of the males were 18 or under voted for an average number of 8/10 so this just strengthens the fact that it is a more a film for men than women. 


There are hundreds of reviews for the film and most of them positive, such as this one; "This is not a slasher movie, indeed. It's a very deep, strange and delicate moment in satire. While it's serious, it's ironic and ridiculous. Great stuff! Funniest and the most (yes I dare say it) brilliant satire I've ever seen. Christian Bale's performance is unbelievable and if someone disagrees, they have to show me how to perform an emotional breakdown for 2 minutes on a phone. Just unbelievable. I've seen this 5 times now and it never gets boring."

Some people were not so impressed by the movie however, on IMDB one person said "one of the worst films I've seen in a long time. It's never quite hallucinatory enough to be surreal; never quite cartoonish enough to be funny; never plausible enough to be taken seriously; and the acting is the worst I've ever seen from Christian Bale. Sadly, this film also wastes the talents of Sevigny & Witherspoon. I guess this was meant to be a dark satire on the Reagan years, but it failed utterly."
          Many people have said the ending is not quite clear however which is a massive flaw in the movie, and also a majority of reviews say you should read the novel to really 'get' the film. I feel the same way, I have not got around to reading it myself yet but with most things the novels are normally a lot better than a film. 


As this film was shot 10 years ago and is a 'real-life' kind of film there is not much technology used it in, just very powerful emotive acting. I think this adds a real emphasis that someone really does live like that and that just makes it all the more thrilling.