Catherine Black (Louise Linton) has it all, and that includes excessive narcissism. As a hedge fund broker, she has made a fortune, and loves ordering her staff around as much as she loves spending her huge profits on the highest of fashion, the swankiest of houses, the fastest of cars and a lifestyle that would be the envy of most royalty. Oh, and she loves to kill men, sometimes seducing them beforehand, but mostly for the sport of it, keeping the body parts in a large chest freezer and never getting so much as a sniff of the law around her, as she is too rich to be bothered by anything as trivial as moral culpability. But what if someone appealed to her heart?
The simplest description of Me You Madness would be a vanity project, coming from a woman who was determined to become a movie star, and married a film producer to ensure she would at least get a foot in the door of her own cinematic vehicle. Louise Linton proceeded to join the ranks of the likes of Tommy Wiseau and Neil Breen by starring in, producing, writing and directing this shameless self-promotion, playing up to the "rich bitch" stereotype she had been landed with ever since said husband Steven Mnuchin became Donald Trump's Treasury Secretary, and therefore was well-used to being cavalier with other people's money, which Linton had been accused of too.
The stories of her spending her husband's impressive US Government salary like water kept her in the gossip columns, but all good things must come to an end and while Mnuchin was an anomaly for keeping his job throughout Trump's administration, they lost the election in 2020 and Linton evidently decided she needed a little extra boost to her publicity machine, hence this would-be self-parody. It was one thing to make fun of yourself, and the rich and powerful of this world could certainly do with exhibiting a little humility every once in a while, but it was another to claim in the first five minutes you were essentially remaking American Psycho, only the psycho was a goodie now.
Linton was evidently much taken with the decade she remembered earliest in her life, the nineteen-eighties, so stuffed her movie with references to pop culture of that era, Cocktail, Flashdance, Footloose, and edging into the nineties for those femmes fatales as seen in Basic Instinct or even social climbers as in Pretty Woman. To underline this further, there was a barrage of hit songs from those years on the soundtrack as well, some originals, but others soundalikes, possibly because they were refused permission to use the sources, and Catherine would bust moves in a Showgirls way to them apropos of nothing. So would her beau, a conman (Ed Westwick) who inveigles his way into her pampered, violent existence ostensibly to relieve her of some of that wealth, but - aww - to steal her heart as well.
The mark of a truly self-indulgent auteur was of course their nude scene, and Linton gave herself one here in that grand tradition, but everything about her was more or less "Come see how good I look!", with professional handsome man Ed feeding her endless (self-penned) compliments about her irresistibility. With moments of insanity throughout - eating a spider, struggling with the corpse of a fat bloke she's murdered for getting an erection in her presence at the gym - we were supposed to believe Catherine was actually mentally ill, but only in a comedy way which allows her to get ahead in business and have it all since it eliminates her conscience. Nowhere is it mentioned she would have to take her beloved spin classes twenty-four hours a day to keep that figure if she really did end up on anti-psychotics as the "happy" ending jokes about. The thing was, Linton did show signs of a good eye for the lavish, and her movie definitely looked lots better than anything by Wiseau or Breen, yet the aggrandisement of her ego was very hard to take. Music by Max Aruj.
