American Psycho2000

The Review

Start with the miracle of the thing existing at all. Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel was so notorious that its original publisher dropped it before publication; another house printed it, protests followed, and for a decade the book was considered unfilmable — too violent, too interior, too in love with brand names. Mary Harron read it and saw what the outrage had missed: it is a comedy. A black, freezing comedy about men so hollowed out by money and status that one of them can confess to murder at a dinner table and be mistaken for a wit. Every American Psycho 2000 review has to reckon with that choice, because it is the whole film: Harron and co-writer Guinevere Turner kept the monologues, kept the designer litanies, kept the murders — and played all of it as satire first and horror second, which is exactly why the horror lands. The scariest thing in the picture is not the axe. It is how little difference the axe makes.

Christian Bale plays Bateman as a performance of a person — which is the point, because Bateman is performing too. The voice never rises. The smile arrives exactly on cue and leaves the same way. He delivers a lecture on Huey Lewis and the News with the reverence of a man reading scripture, then puts on a raincoat. Harron has said that Bale built that eerie, intense friendliness after watching a Tom Cruise interview — all warmth, nothing behind the eyes — and Bale stayed in the accent and the character through the shoot, a commitment that makes total sense once you see the film: Bateman does not have an off switch either. Around him, the ensemble is a rogues’ gallery of beautiful, interchangeable ghouls — Jared Leto’s golden-boy Paul Allen, Justin Theroux and Josh Lucas as colleagues who cannot tell each other apart, Reese Witherspoon as a fiancée engaged to a man who does not exist — and Willem Dafoe‘s detective Kimball, circling quietly, asking questions Bateman answers a half-beat too smoothly. Chloë Sevigny’s Jean is the film’s one warm body, a secretary whose decency the film keeps in frame like a candle it may or may not blow out.

The set pieces have become folklore, and they earn it. The business-card scene — five words of copy and a roomful of men quietly dying over fonts and watermarks — is the funniest, truest scene in the film, and it is also its thesis: these are men who would kill over card stock, so of course one of them kills over everything else. The Allen murder, staged to “Hip to Be Square” with Bateman moonwalking into position in his raincoat, is choreographed like a music video and plays like a nightmare. The chainsaw dropped down a stairwell. The cash machine that instructs him to feed it a stray cat. The drawings Jean finds in his desk — the film’s quietest, coldest scare, delivered in pencil. And threaded through it all, the morning routine that opens the picture: a thousand crunches, an ice mask, a liturgy of products, a man assembling a human being out of purchases before our eyes. “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman,” he tells us. “There is no real me.”

What Harron refuses to do is let the audience off. The violence is abrupt and ugly when it comes — the stabbing of a homeless man and his dog early on is the film at its least stylized and most sickening — but the deeper discomfort is social: nobody in Bateman’s world can see him, because seeing him would require seeing themselves. His confessions are treated as jokes. His fiancée, his colleagues, his lawyer — every one of them files the monster under banter. When the film finally corners him into a full, sobbing, answering-machine confession, the world simply declines to believe it, and the last movement of the picture turns that refusal into the real horror: not that a killer walks free, but that there is nothing in this world solid enough to stop him, least of all the truth. Whether every murder happened is a question the film deliberately leaves open — and by the end, it hardly matters. The emptiness is not ambiguous at all.

The road here was nearly as strange as the film. At one point the studio chased a much bigger production — Leonardo DiCaprio starring, Oliver Stone directing — and the whole thing collapsed; Harron returned, and Bale, who had stayed attached through the chaos and reportedly turned down other work to keep the part, got to make the small, sharp version instead. Thank heaven for collapsed deals. A glossier American Psycho would have sanded off exactly the edges that make this one immortal. The MPAA still drew blood: the first cut was rated NC-17 over a scene with two call girls, and seconds were trimmed to win the R. Its “Hip to Be Square” sequence became a legal legend of its own — the song was pulled from the soundtrack album after release, and why depends on whose account you take.

Spoiler Section

Stop here if you have never seen it. Bateman keeps his secrets for first-timers.

Bateman murders Paul Allen with an axe in his own apartment, hides the body in an overnight bag, and quietly takes over Allen’s empty flat — leaving messages on its machine reporting that Paul has gone to London. Detective Kimball interviews Bateman three times about the disappearance; Bateman feeds him a smooth, rehearsed alibi each time, and the case never closes on screen. Bateman kills a homeless man and his dog, attempts to shoot a stray cat into a cash machine that orders him to feed it, murders two call girls — one of them, Christie, by dropping a chainsaw down a stairwell as she flees — and dissolves further into mania, shooting his way through a night-time rampage that may or may not be real. He leaves a full confession on his lawyer’s answering machine. Days later, the lawyer, Harold Carnes, laughs it off as a joke — and tells Bateman he recently dined with Paul Allen in London. Twice. Bateman returns to his table of friends, unpunished, unexposed, and utterly unheard, and understands the film’s last truth in voiceover: his confession has meant nothing.

Trivia

• The novel came first, and it was a scandal. Simon & Schuster dropped Ellis’s book before publication over its violence; Vintage published it in 1991, and it has never been out of the conversation since.
• The DiCaprio detour was real. A bigger production — Leonardo DiCaprio starring for director Oliver Stone — was announced and then fell apart, returning the film to Harron and Bale.
• Bale borrowed the smile. Harron has said Bale modelled Bateman’s intense, empty friendliness on a Tom Cruise television interview — warmth with nothing behind it.
• The cards are real design. The business-card scene’s props — eggshell white, raised lettering, watermarks — were made to be genuinely covetable, which is why the scene plays as tragedy and farce at once.
• NC-17, briefly. The MPAA’s first rating was NC-17, over the scene with Christie and Elizabeth; a few seconds were cut to secure the R.
• The “Hip to Be Square” affair has two tellings. The label president’s account said Huey Lewis objected to the film’s violence and had the song pulled from the soundtrack album; Lewis said in 2013 that account was completely made up, and his manager said the song had been used without permission. The album was recalled and reissued without it.
• Jean’s discovery is the film’s hinge. The sketchbook of drawings Sevigny’s Jean finds in Bateman’s desk is the one moment someone sees him clearly — and she never learns what she saw.

Where to Watch

Checked November 9, 2026. Streaming with a subscription on Prime Video, Peacock and Lionsgate+ (via Prime Video), free with ads on The Roku Channel, and to rent or buy on Amazon Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home.

The Verdict

American Psycho is that rarest of things: a horror film whose monster is a mirror. Harron took the most hated novel of its decade and found the joke, the tragedy and the terror hiding in the same tailored suit — and Bale gave her a performance for the ages, a man made entirely of surfaces, screaming silently underneath every one of them. It was too funny for the horror crowd and too horrible for the comedy crowd in 2000, and time has settled the argument the way time usually does: it is both, completely, at once. Dorsia is still fully booked. The card stock is still impeccable. And the man at the head of the table is still deciding.

Dinner is at eight, horror lover. Order anything you like. He has already decided what you are.

Rating: 4 ravens out of 5.