Nothing screams psychological thriller like being locked in a closet with your bad date. Which is exactly what goes down in an exclusive first-look clip from the October 6 film Cat Person, directed by Susanna Fogel from a screenplay written by Michelle Ashford. Based on Kristen Roupenian’s short story of the same name, the adaptation of the blockbuster New Yorker piece stars Succession’s Nicholas Braun and Coda’s Emilia Jones, following their unsettling attempt at romance in the age of text message flirtation and age-gap discourse. Braun plays Robert, an older man who frequents the movie theater where the 20-year-old college sophomore works, briefly worming his way into her life.
Robert and Margot find themselves in the storage room of an old earth-science lab, full of diagrams on human evolution and ant farms jutting from the wall. A crimson light fills the claustrophobic space, where Etruscan artifacts and human bones from Italy sit in banker boxes, Margot tells him. Some have been discovered from non-funerary burial sites. “Dark, I know,” she says, clearly nerding out about the remains of an ancient slave who was decapitated. Somehow, Robert is still the creepy one in this scenario. He can’t seem to help being an overly tall, bearded middle-age weirdo. After the door slams shut while her back is turned, Margot gets the impression that he’s gonna do something sinister, imagining his potential attack. “I think it’s locked,” Robert says. “Or, I did it on purpose … Because, I’m actually a werewolf.” Girl … run.