Spoilers follow, but you might as well read this because if you watched the trailer then you know what happens in the movie, anyway.
I watched Greta before the COVID-19 shutdown and at the time, I thought this movie required a lot of suspension of believe to watch. Why in the world is the young woman in this movie so trusting and naïve? How did she end up the prey of this unimaginative stalker woman with a fabulous bohemian gem of an apartment in New York City?
I am in this mid-COVID-19 world now, skimming through Greta so I can write this review and I can now clearly see that there are people who think differently than I do. I was just having a conversation with my best friend about how people think: Some people only think out a few steps past their action, some people think out many steps past their action and some people don't consider the consequences of their actions at all. All those people who went to the Trump rally in Tulsa. All those young folks who partied after the summer 2020 re-opening. All those people who had COVID parties so they can get it and get it over with. They would all, after some chain of events, find themselves locked in the room behind Greta’s piano if they were the protagonist in this movie.
Back to the movie: At nearly 20 minutes into the movie Frances, the protagonist, discovers that Greta does this regularly: Sets it up so that nice, honest and usually vulnerable people find her purse on the subway and then try to return it, possibly getting caught in Greta’s trap. After discovering this fact, Frances does the smart thing and tries to get away from Greta. But then, for some stupid, bad-writing, terrible logic reason, Frances decides to dig into Greta’s life. It's like she can’t even let go. To add to the funky odd story, Greta doesn’t even bother to hide. It's like the opposite of other obsession movies, this obsessor isn’t even trying to hide her crazy behavior.
This movie was a bad. It needed more better writing and filmmaking techniques to pull off a dark obsession story. There are too many good obsession movies that put this to shame. Greta gets two stars** because I watched it, but I would never recommend it, I don’t want to watch it again and I would delete the catalog record from the library if I had control over such things.
Greta brought to mind an old movie about obsession that I’d like to revisit. Have you ever seen Mark Wahlberg’s 1996 obsessive bad-boy in Fear? I used to love that movie.
I checked the Greta DVD out from the library. Burn it.
