But Harron has, thankfully, cleaned up the crime scene of Ellis' regrettable novel, sucking up a great proportion of the blood, better to convey the lifeless, bloodless despair of a pristinely coiffed but emotionally flat-line yuppie who hangs with a pack of fellow corporate sharks. Surface dominates in Harron's finely calibrated Manhattan, where the measure of a man is the lettering and color of his business card and his ability to bag a good table at a top-notch restaurant.
Conversation is so slick and slippery, it ricochets in dead air.
Harron cuts to the heart of the often vicious, bloody nature of social intercourse and status-jockeying, which can feel as primal and cruel as any real battle. Harron offers a hilarious encapsulation of the ferociously narcissistic and obsessive Bateman mindset in an early scene where his voice-over account takes us through the multiple gels, masks, creams and lotions that arm the modern Master of the Universe for a day at the office. Such confusion over identity seems Harron's effort to show a character so disembodied and rootless in his own skin, he truly isn't anyone but the Cerruti suit on his back and the Clinique mask on his skin. At a certain point in American Psycho , after Bateman's bloodsport is well under way, Harron loses hold of the film, adding more and more murder scenes to the brew, which never further develop or complicate either Bateman or the plot. A seriously misjudged moment of slasher film, chainsaw lunacy threatens to completely dismantle Harron's previous cool, sinister precision.