Just days ago at Sundance, the world premiere of Winner (reviewed here) saw director Susanna Fogel and star Emilia Jones in attendance. But this wasn’t their first collaboration. That would’ve been almost exactly one year ago, also at Sundance, with the world premiere of Cat Person. While this odd little thriller about a young woman who dates an older man who says he has cats earned strong reviews, it opened in October and nobody saw it. To be fair, the distribution was a joke. Even the December streaming release was only on Hoopla (a real thing) and Spectrum. Well, that’s about to change as the film finally comes to Hulu.
So, if you missed Cat Person the first time around, and it’s likely that you did, the film hits Hulu on February 9th. Joining Jones in the cast are Nicholas Braun, Geraldine Viswanathan, Hope Davis, Fred Melamed, and Isabella Rossellini.
The story is based on Kristen Roupenian’s 2017 short, and it’s definitely a weird one. Who would lie about having cats???
Here’s the synopsis: When Margot, a college sophomore (Emilia Jones) goes on a date with the older Robert (Nicholas Braun), she finds that IRL Robert doesn’t live up to the Robert she has been flirting with over texts. Cat Person is a razor-sharp exploration of the gender divide, the quagmire of navigating modern dating and the dangerous projections we make in our minds about the person at the other end of our phones.
You can check out Cortland’s review of Cat Person here, as well as her interview with Susanna Fogel below.