Neil Jordan’s work has never shied from exploring the tricky, emotionally tangled nature of companionship. From Interview With a Vampire to The Crying Game, the Irish director has made humans’ fear of isolation and desperation for connection a dramatic focal point of his films. For the Greta writer and director, it’s a theme born from his own fears.
“Well, I hate being on my own, you know?” Jordan told The Hollywood Reporter this week at a special New York screening of his new Focus Features film. “I can’t stand it.”
Neither can the leading characters of his latest project, a horror-thriller starring Chloe Grace Moretz and Isabelle Huppert that is set to hit theaters March 1. During the film, the writer-director homes in on the sweet-turned-sinister bond between two women, both of whom are grappling with loneliness in a city of millions and an era of instant, mobile socialization.
Moretz plays Frances, a young woman living and working in Manhattan. Though she rarely finds herself alone, thanks to her roommate and best friend, Frances has been quietly plagued by grief-fueled loneliness since her mother’s death. When the young woman picks up a bag left on a subway seat and decides to return it, she becomes enveloped in the solitary but warmly charming world of the older and also lonely Greta (Isabelle Huppert).
They are fast companions, filling familial-like holes in each other’s lives. But when their relationship begins to crumble, Greta reveals just how far she will go to never be alone.
“This story is like Fatal Attraction, it’s like Basic Instinct, it’s like Single White Female, but it’s not about a man and a woman,” Moretz said ahead of the film’s screening. “It’s not about this sexual, sordid relationship. It’s about this almost cosmic star-crossing of two lost souls and how you can let this darkness into your heart from loss and loneliness.”
The full story was first published at The Hollywood Reporter on Feb. 20, 2019.
