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The film tells the story of a successful Wall Street trader in the late 80's who leads an insane double-life as a serial killer twisted with blood-lust and rage. American Psycho, both the book and the film, is essentially an incredibly black comedy; a satire on the outrageous consumerism of the late 80's and the shallow existence of the Wall Street yuppies of the period. The killing of one of Bateman's colleagues brings him to the attention of a police detective who is slowly piecing together the facts.

Being a big fan of Bret Easton Ellis' original novel made me doubt the possible success of a movie version. The book's style of constant materialistic monologues, coupled with it's anally retentive attention to detail in describing consumer products worked well on the printed page but I couldn't see how it would translate to the screen. Then, of course, is the problem of dealing with the book's controversial, incredibly graphic, perverse violence. For these reasons many people wrote American Psycho off as being unfilmable. How wrong people were. Mary Harron's film is a success on every count. Wisely side-stepping the explicit violence by simply not showing it, we get the murderous antics off-screen as the camera lingers on title character Patrick Bateman's face. In other areas too, Harron shows wonderful control in where her screenplay veers from or stays faithful to the book, depending on how the strengths of the cinema can be exploited. A good example of this comes late in the film during Bateman's seemingly total breakdown; as the audience loses grip of whether these events are really happening or simply part of Bateman's imagination, Harron throws in exploding police cars, shootouts and helicopters that befit the Hollywood fantasy inside Bateman's head. Visually the film is a treat. Harron draws on the films of Stanley Kubrick in both her use of deep focus and careful in-frame composition that make many scenes resemble exquisite still paintings. The volatile mind of Bateman is often reflected visually in stark cuts from darkened night clubs and bars to Bateman's ultra bright apartment where he performs his morning work-out in crisp white boxers. There were some strange rumours surrounding this particular DVD. As a specific Canadian issue, it kind of sneaked on to the market when everybody was waiting for the US version, and rumours of the disc being a bootleg were flying around the internet. This is very untrue. Like every DVD release that isn't a full blown feature crammed special edition, I'm always left wanting more. The disc packs a punch where it counts, ie: the main feature; but is only backed by a modest array of extra features.