Review of Copycat (1995) by Paul Z — 15 Mar 2009

Released roughly around the same time David Fincher's vastly superior Se7en, this fair enough chiller has another serial killer who is not just appeased by killing. He wants to construct a narrative with his murders, and give the police a heightened sense of sullied significance. He's a disciple of the infamous sequential butchers of the past, and each of his murder scenes is meticulously directed to refer to the crimes by Son of Sam, Boston and Hillside.

That consideration of little fine points longs for an audience, and the killer has one in Sigourney Weaver, a criminal psychologist who has written the book on serial killers and is renowned in said domain. The movie opens as Weaver is giving a lecture. In the audience is one of her former clients, serial killer Daryll Lee Cullum, played in a curious but quite successful piece of casting in the performance of pop-jazz musician Harry Connick, Jr., who smirks perversely with bad teeth. She blinks and he's gone, but she should know better than to go into the women's restroom thereafter.

What happens there turns Weaver agoraphobic, and she spends the next year or so hiding in her apartment and drinking too much, so petrified of the world she has to use a broom to pull the newspaper through the front door. Cullum is soon behind bars, but another killer, the copycat, is operating and when Weaver figures out what he's doing, she calls the police officer supervising the investigation. That would be Holly Hunter, a dainty woman in rooms that are otherwise full of big men. She is outgoing, chipper, warm-hearted and affable, and almost talks down to her superiors and burly colleagues.

The tension marches along rather foreseen lines. Cullum, who is in jail, looks as if to have a connection with the copycat. And naturally one of the copycat's prey is going to be Sigourney Weaver, who walks through her shadowy apartment and takes showers and enacts all of the other potboiler commonplaces. She also consumes an excessive expanse of time hanging half-strangled in a bathroom, both at the beginning and when the cop busts in, he lets her just hang there while he's looking for his arrest.

The movie is surprisingly anti-climactic, ending up precisely where we thought it would and wrapping up with haste. Before you know it, a layered, suspenseful cop thriller has just dispersed. This fairly simple nut to crack does however impart relatively novel characters and makes them more crucial than a clockwork plot. Weaver is good, if in an indentured role. You will be unable to see Harry Connick, Jr. the same way ever again, and Hunter is in her domain as the tough cop, building, within the limitations this genre picture, one of the more fully developed characters of the 1990s thrillers.