Here’s a thriller from the 90s that caught my eye—notwithstanding some of its similarities to a certain other film that has no lambs actually being silenced (ironically), there did seem to be things to talk about with Jon Amiel’s Copycat.
Sigourney Weaver is the headlining star here as Doctor Helen Hudson, a criminal psychologist (whose lectures, thirty years later, still feel worryingly relevant) who ends up in a traumatic experience as she’s ambushed by a deranged murderer. Ending up as a recluse, Helen tries to deal with this by sealing herself in a bunker-like apartment with none but a computer and a personal assistant for company.
Of course, soon another killer ends up stalking San Francisco, prompting a pair of detectives (Holly Hunter and Dermot Mulroney) to seek her assistance. Some of the film’s period is felt in how blasé some of the characters are to the very obvious mental struggles Helen is going through, but in other places, there’s definite prescience at play here, as Helen is also essentially sent abuse via the then-burgeoning internet from this new murderer.
There’s definitely something being hit on with the film’s themes—that morbid fascination permeating society with the worst kind of defilers of human life. People still obsess over Jack the Ripper 140 years on, while Netflix puts forward documentaries and series on the likes of Dahmer to the Night Stalker. As Poe would put it, it’s that imp of the perverse pulling our heads towards the real-life macabre no matter how much we wouldn’t—and it’s that kind of attention that many in real life have seized upon, while both media and public grab onto it no matter what.
Copycat as a film does look into the darker side of that, with Helen forced to relive traumas and delve once again into things she strove to avoid—at the same time, though, it is sort of a flick sustained mostly by the performances. The script gets kind of contrived at points, and it’s another case of serial killers being apparently able to effortlessly overpower trained police officers (which…they really don’t tend to be).
For its flaws, it still has something compelling—and honestly, it’s also something that might actually be worth a remake or at least a spiritual successor. In our ever more online world, where more depraved acts get shared, imitated, and praised, where we do end ups with murderers as petty as the ones here and the cults that seemingly spring up around them…it does feel like a setup that a director and a more balanced script could really strike into. Something to consider, I guess…
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