Forget every film that has been compared to Hitchcock since 1976. "American Psycho" is the first film to truly pay homage to the master of horror and suspense since his death. Notice the opening moments of the film. The combination of music and images are perfectly bonded to elicit a feeling, a heightened tension. John Cale proves himself the only true successor to Bernard Hermann with a wicked, perfectly spaced and perfectly tensed score for the film, from opening credits sequence to the final frame.

Writer/director Mary Harron delivers a film that spews forth out of the hollowness of the 1980's like so much Republican rhetoric. The bleak, vapid, colorless, emotionless, emptiness of the decade serves as the device by which the same void is essayed in the mind of a serial killer. It's a Hitchcockian vision of 1984.

The personification of this is Patrick Bateman, a vampiric, corporate non-entity whose masturbatory explorations of death border on the inhuman. A similar scrutiny of his sexuality might seem to find his desires bordering on the homosexual. In fact, it is his complete inability to connect with anyone or anything, male, female or otherwise, that leaves him cold. He is barely able to escape into the insipid nothingness of his own perfected, apricot scrubbed, facade. He practically ceases to exist even in his own skin until we see him as truly hollow. A chocolate Easter bunny of a man. With candy eyes.,

Unable to evoke any feeling within his self, Bateman sweeps through the darkness of day and night like a turgid tube of flesh, searching endlessly for any feeling that sex, drugs or homicidal mania can evoke from within him. It is only, it seems, though a complete engulfment in the latter that he is able to illicit any emotional response at all from his inner self.

Christian Bale's Patrick is superb. Taunt, taut, and haute, he barely exists in a world of corporate meaninglessness that finds seemingly grown men comparing colorless, sleek 3 piece suits, business cards in various subtle shades of white, and occasional tryst with the opposite sex. The film presents a cold, distanced, inert, and perfunctory world and Bale's glossy, linear, muscle-toned, prefabricated facade of a man fits into this snugly. When the script moves to the realm of the inordinate, Bale's human but seemingly empty sausage casing becomes florid with perverse emotional vibrancy and undeniable inner turmoil. It's riveting. Like watching a cat trying to claw it's way out of a plastic bag.

Here, on film, Harron brings forth another world. As she proved with "I Shot Andy Warhol," her ability to transport the audience in time with seemingly no special effects is amazing. Her lusterless, stainless steel sets with exact shimmering black lacquer borders are decorated, for lack of a better word, with crisp, linear modern art and sparse, trendy furniture. The look of the film continually serves to remind us of the vapidity and the shallowness of the era which is being presenting. The film, simply, looks perfectly exact. It's wonderful. Yes, again. It's Hitchcockian. And post- modern. At the same. Time. Brian DiPalma should bow down and kiss her feet.

Herron's script, which she wrote with Guinevere Turner (who wrote "Go Fish"), is based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel. One can only assume the source is the same sort of masterpiece of the cavernous perversity and empty decadence that this film is. One of the most disturbing and unsettling mechanisms in the script is the completely insane yet perfectly measured diatribes about banal pop music that Bale delivers during his most compacted and concentrated moments in the film. He delivers these in such a precise and obtuse manner that it becomes one of the most awe striking and creepy devices you will ever encounter in film. Like a man reading from the prepared text of his own decaying mind.

Harron's film is a putrid and disturbing, gore-filled, sex- drenched, drugged-up dissertation on the complete triteness and pointlessness of existing in a society that values nothing but money and greed. Facade. Her film is a pointed and dense black comedy that isn't funny. Like the best of such comedy, being amused by it makes us feel dirty. Turns our stomach.

"American Psycho" has wonderful and perfected, stilted acting. All of Bale's costars deliver the same sort of diligently affected characters as the lead. Jared Leto, Resse Witherspoon, Chloe Sevigny, William Sage and the others in the cast deliver the exact same tension and impenetrable cohesion in their work as Bale. Willem Dafoe's character, a detective, soon falls into the exact same category. This is an ensemble that gets the perfect edginess and convex lucidity of their characters. These are mirror images of characters, reflected at odd angles for so many revolutions that they become crisp yet again, defying reality and science.

This is the magic lantern. This is a brilliant film. It has an almost flawless script. It plays on our ideas about the existence of evil and, in it's final analysis, proves that indifference, heartlessness, and greed are, by far, the biggest amorality of all.

There is much behind that vacuous face. It is vicious in it's nothingness.

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