‘Greta’ Review Roundup: Neil Jordan’s New Thriller Gets Mixed Reaction From Critics

The newest film from Academy-Award winning writer Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) has critics conflicted. The film, which stars French actress and 2017 Oscar nominee Isabelle Huppert and American actress Chloe Grace Moretz, follows Frances (Moretz), a grieving young girl who returns a handbag she found on the New York subway to an elderly widow named Greta (Huppert). Unsuspecting, Frances gives Greta her contact information and soon finds herself suspect to Greta’s consistent stalking and terrifying motives.

The film, which is Jordan’s first directorial credit since 2012’s Byzantium, has been both praised and berated by critics. On the one hand, critics from Rolling Stone and Variety criticized the plot and Jordan’s cliched horror tactics, with Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers saying that the “plot points unravel like Hitchcock for Dummies 101.” Rather than relying on the twists and surprising moments that made his 1992 film The Crying Game so appealing, Variety’s Peter Debruge critiques Jordan for relying too heavily on predictable tropes. In a similar vein, The New York Times called the film’s twists “impossible to take seriously” and The Washington Post called it “irritating” and “preposterous.”

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Nevertheless, critics had high praise for the film’s two lead actresses. “Huppert pulls out all the funny-scary stops playing cat to Moretz’s mouse,” Travers wrote. “You can’t take your eyes off these two dynamos.” Debruge said that plot-wise, the film “falls squarely in B movie territory, but, by virtue of its two lead performers, winds up being far more enjoyable than it has any right to be.” The Hollywood Reporter’s Keith Uhlich dubs the pair a “first-class bunch.”

The film, which premiered first during the Toronto International Film Festival in September, will be released in the United States on March 1. Mostly thanks to its lead stars, the film currently holds a 71% approval rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. 

Watch the trailer for Jordan’s Greta here: