Watching: Greta

[white_hart]

Neil Jordan's new film, Greta, is a classic stalker thriller. Chloë Grace Moretz stars as Frances, a Bostonian innocent in New York City whose well-meaning act of returning a bag found on the subway to its owner ("In New York, if you find a bag you call the bomb squad!" chides her more worldly-wise flatmate) lets her in for more than she bargains for as Isabelle Huppert's Greta proves not to be the delighful new friend she appears to be. Nothing in the plot is really going to come as a surprise to anyone with even a passing familiarity with the stalker genre, and the jumps are all well-signposted by music and atmosphere, but they're jumpy nonetheless, and while if I'm honest it tended a bit too much towards horror for me it was entertaining enough (and probably better than the alternative, Red Joan, which I suspect would be rather formulaic and which reviews suggest suffers from Not Enough Judi Dench).