'Greta' What We Know Without Seeing It

What is it about?

Greta tells the story of an elderly woman, by the name of Greta, who leaves her purse on the subway. The purse is recovered by a teenager named Francis McCullen who sets about returning the purse to Greta. So thankful is Greta for the return of her purse that she invites Frances to dinner and charms her with her life story and appeals to her sympathies by talking about how lonely she gets. The friendship starts well, but soon Greta’s insatiable need for attention becomes overwhelming while evidence of her seeming mental illness slowly begins to surface.

Who's in it?

Greta stars French acting legend Isabelle Huppert as Greta. Huppert is a 16 time Cesar nominee and won the French equivalent of the Academy Award on two occasions. Huppert has worked with incredible directors in that time including Bertrand Tavernier, Jean Luc Godard, and David O Russell. She’s also worked with Paul Verhoeven, a seemingly unlikely partnership that nevertheless resulted in an Academy Award nomination for Huppert in 2016’s Elle.

Rising star Chloe Grace Moretz co-stars in Greta as Frances. Moretz rose to fame as Hit-Girl in the 2010 hit super-hero comedy, Kickass. Since then, Moretz has gone on to work extensively though rarely with as much box office success as Kickass. Moretz’s biggest hit to date was the hit sequel Neighbors: Sorority Rising where she played the college girl antagonist to Seth Rogan and Rose Byrne’s disgruntled married couple. Most recently, Moretz has eschewed the mainstream in favor of more daring roles in The Miseducation of Cameron Poe, a drama about gay conversion therapy, and a small role in Luca Guadagnino’s failed remake of Suspiria.

Moretz’s co-star in the teen sci-fi bomb The Fifth Wave, Maika Monroe, co-stars in Greta along with veteran character actors Colm Feore and Stephen Rea. Rea, of course, is in Greta to re-team with his longtime director and friend Neil Jordan. Rea is best known for his turn in Jordan’s Academy Award nominated The Crying Game in 1992. Since then, Rea and Jordan have worked together seven times. Greta, however, is the first time that Rea and Jordan have worked together since 2005’s little seen indie movie, Breakfast on Pluto.

Who's Neil Jordan?

Millennials should be forgiven for not immediately knowing the name Neil Jordan. Though—within the industry and in his home country of Ireland—Jordan is a renowned auteur, his movies are rarely in the mainstream. The last time Jordan had a release as wide as Greta was in 2007 when he directed Jodie Foster in the revenge drama The Brave One. Prior to that, you have to go back to 1994 for the last time Jordan directed a mainstream feature. That year, Jordan directed Interview with the Vampire starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

Interview with the Vampire is remembered today as that campy Tom Cruise vampire movie with Brad Pitt at his most pretty. In 1994 however, it became the only "blockbuster" of Neil Jordan’s career, earning 223 million dollars on a 60 million dollar budget. Jordan’s career as a mainstream filmmaker, however, was always doomed to be short-lived, as he always preferred working in his home country of Ireland where he is a beloved scion of the Irish Film Board—which has financed many of his best films, including The Crying Game.

That sounds familiar...

The title The Crying Game is likely familiar to most audiences. The film’s "twist," so to speak, was among the most talked about and memorable of the 1990s. The film is at once a landmark and a deeply problematic feature. Openly gay actor Jaye Davidson earned an Academy Award nomination for his work as Dil, the transgender love interest of Stephen Rea’s Fergus. That said, many look back on the film as problematic for a scene that depicts Fergus’s first reaction to having made love to Dil.

In that scene, Fergus reacts with disgust and fear. He punches Dil in the face and then vomits in the shower. Regardless of how the film plays out with Fergus eventually realizing he loves Dil, that scene became an early form of a meme, an anti-trans shorthand for hatred and bigotry. However, unintentionally, the scene became for a time a cudgel used to bully and belittle transgender people; most notably with a deeply unforgivable scene in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.