7. It Uses Editing To Confuse You
Do you remember feeling a bit off kilter whenever Willem Dafoes character, Detective Donald Kimball, cropped up in American Psycho? If so, that means you fell prey to a deliberate dash of filmmaking trickery employed by Harron. Youre meant to feel a bit confused by Dafoes character, because Bateman is too. Harron achieved this effect (which totally worked on me, for the record) by instructing Mr Dafoe to play each of his scenes in three distinctly different ways. In one take, shed get him to act like Kimball knew that Bateman killed Paul Allen. In another, Dafoe would act like he didnt have a clue. And in the third version, hed be unsure about whether Bateman did it. In the edit, Harron ensured that these three takes were intercut meaning that Dafoe exudes this weird vibe like his character is constantly changing. Its very hard to read Kimball, which helps us see these conversations from Batemans paranoid point of view. Clever, isnt it?