by Linda Kay
Starring: Sydney
Directed by: AndrĂ© Ă˜vredal
This review contains a severe Kitty Carnage Warning!
Cat Out of the Bag Alert! This review contains some spoilers for this film!
Synopsis: When the well-preserved body of an unidentified young woman is found in the basement of a home where several gruesome murders have taken place, the police depend on mortuary owner Mr. Tilden (Brian Cox) and his son Austin (Emile Hirsch) to discover the Jane Doe’s cause of death.
Cat Burglar (Scene Stealer): Another resident of the mortuary is a torbie cat named Stanley who hunts the air ducts of the aging building for rats.
When Jane Doe is brought into the mortuary and placed on the examining table, Stanley tries to warn them before they begin by hissing, but is simply scolded for being mean. The cat slinks off in frustration.
Later when strange things start happening, Austin hears odd noises coming from a nearby duct. At first something launches at him which makes him fall backwards. But when he looks back into the vent with his father he sees the eyes of Stanley.
Kitty Carnage Warning! Austin pulls the badly injured cat from the duct and he and his father look at one another in shock. Mr. Tilden sadly takes the suffering cat from his son and after a moment breaks the cat’s neck in a mercy killing. They burn Stanley’s body in the incinerator and all that is said about him after this is that he belonged to Mr. Tilden’s late wife and he is clearly upset with the loss.
Stanley was played by cat actor Sydney whose performance was sadly not helped by the use of some unrealistic CGI. This is in no way the fault of the cat actor or their trainer, Charlotte Wilde, but this film includes one of the most unrealistic cat hisses in all of cinema. We appreciate that the cat actor was not prompted to become aggravated to simulate the cat hissing but at the same time just superimposing an open mouth over an otherwise completely relaxed cat just does not get the job done. In addition the cat’s hurt look afterwards also appeared to be done with CGI. On the plus side, most of the scenes with the injured cat appear to have been accomplished by using a fake cat in place of the cat actor.
Final Mewsings: Good or bad we appreciate CGI that saves stress on cat actors.
Many thanks to Yayoi Neko, Serjina and Mark Murton for letting me know about the cat in this film.
Relevant Links:
To discuss this film and other cats in movies and on television, join us on Facebook and X.