American Psycho

Patrick Bateman is a 27-year-old Vice President at Pierce & Pierce, a Manhattan investment bank. He is obsessive about his appearance, his routine, his apartment, and his status among his colleagues — all of whom are virtually interchangeable in their suits, their business cards, their affected tastes. Bateman narrates his own existence with a dead, hollow precision: the brand names, the morning routines, the restaurants. Beneath the surface, he is consumed by violent fantasies and, increasingly, by acts of violence themselves.

The film never fully commits to whether Bateman's killings are real or imagined — a central ambiguity Mary Harron builds deliberately. He murders his colleague Paul Allen with an axe while wearing a raincoat and monologuing about Huey Lewis and the News. He kills prostitutes. He dismembers bodies in his apartment. He calls his lawyer in a rambling, confessional message, naming every victim. But when he returns to Paul Allen's apartment expecting to find a crime scene, it has been cleaned and listed for sale — and his lawyer insists he had dinner with Paul Allen in London weeks after the supposed murder date.

Detective Donald Kimball investigates Paul Allen's disappearance, circling Bateman with polite, knowing questions. Bateman grows more unraveled and his grip on reality increasingly strained. His fiancée Jean is kind and genuine and completely invisible to him. His colleague Luis, whom Bateman attempts to strangle, misreads it as a romantic gesture.

The film ends without resolution. When Bateman confesses to Price that he has done terrible things, Price dismisses it — nobody takes him seriously because nobody truly sees anyone else. The final narration makes clear that no catharsis is coming. Whether Bateman is a killer or a man disintegrating into violent fantasy, the world around him is too self-absorbed to notice or care. The horror is the system, not just the man.