Film review: ‘Greta’

New York’s MTA gets a lot of flak for subway trains running late, but the thriller “Greta” exposes another pitfall of the system: the lack of open “Lost and Found” offices might cost you your life.

None of the film’s terrors would have ever happened had Frances (Chloë Grace Moretz) been able to drop off the purse she found on the subway with an attendant. She would never have looked at the ID in the bag and gone to the address of one Greta Hideg (Isabelle Huppert).

Not that Frances’s roommate Erica (Maika Monroe) didn’t try to stop her. Erica comes through with some real New Yorker advice like, “This is Manhattan - if you find a bag on the subway, you call the bomb squad.” As a real capitalist in her mid-20s living in a Tribeca loft purchased by her father, Erica is full of good ideas - like taking the cash from the bag and getting roomie colonics together.

If only! Frances has the charming but unfortunate small-town goodness about her that is so often punished in cinema. She not only returns Greta’s bag, but becomes her fast friend. Because Frances sticks around “like chewing gum,” she helps the older francophone rescue a dog and listens to her tinkle out some Chopin on the piano.

It quickly becomes clear that Greta is seeking the relationship of a boa constrictor to a bunny rabbit, so Frances tries to withdraw. She suspects that maybe Greta’s daughter isn’t alive and that she isn’t even the first unlucky soul to return a “lost” handbag. Greta starts appearing at Frances’s work, following her down the streets and, most egregiously, being a bad mother to her adopted pooch.

Huppert makes the whole thing work, especially in a scene where she’s carried off on a stretcher but hardly diminished - we know she’ll rise to stalk again. Perhaps the lesson is to always avoid Huppert in any film where she plays piano. She’s a terror on the 77 keys in “The Piano Teacher” and “Merci pour le Chocolat,” inducing shudders with that thin smile scything over her shoulder.

The film is a return to notoriety from director Neil Jordan - it’s been a long time since the early success of “The Crying Game” and more recently he’s been dabbling in vampire and mermaid movies. Here he taps into the mood of later, more hysterical Hitchcock and Claude Chabrol (who worked with Huppert to great effect across seven pictures).

A nice element of “Greta” is that men are seldom seen on screen, and prove themselves utterly useless when they do appear. As Greta’s hijinks escalate, Frances’s father (Colm Feore) does nothing more than tell her to be careful over the phone until he is at last compelled to hire a private dick. The detective - played by Stephen Rea - appears at Greta’s house to investigate and is then very surprised by what he finds in the bedroom.

Hearts are in throats for the last 20 minutes, kicked off by a cookie cutter scene (in the literal sense of a cookie cutter scene) that’s one of the most diabolically shriek-inducing in memory. The delirious conclusion shows that Huppert’s Greta has more in common with Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh than you might think.

The plot probably needed one more turn of the screw to make the film more singular but the acting helps cover any patches in the script. Chloe Grace Moretz is game for the challenge of working with a legend and Monroe (who broke out in the 2014 hit “It Follows”) is enjoyably exasperated with all the shenanigans that keep interrupting her yoga practice.

But she knows that it’s up to the women in the picture to sort things out, so she does.