‘American Psycho’ is an unconventional horror film that turns the greed and vanity of 1980s Wall Street into the perfect breeding ground for a serial killer. It’s both a satire and a psychological nightmare, set in an era when success was measured by money, status, and surface perfection, and where beneath the glossy veneer lay moral and emotional rot.

Christian Bale gives an extraordinary performance as Patrick Bateman, a wealthy Manhattan investment banker who spends his nights murdering colleagues and strangers – or perhaps only fantasising about doing so. The film cleverly blurs the line between reality and delusion, asking whether Bateman’s acts of violence are actually happening or exist solely in his fractured mind. Either way, the horror is the same: this man is indistinguishable from everyone around him.

Bateman’s obsessions are comically banal. He lectures victims on the brilliance of Huey Lewis and the News, Phil Collins, and Whitney Houston while committing unspeakable crimes. He competes with his colleagues over who has the most elegant business card. It’s all about image, status, and the illusion of control – a world where narcissism is currency and empathy is obsolete.

What makes the film so disturbing is how empty Bateman is. He has a fiancée, mistresses, and a meticulously maintained body-care routine, yet he’s ultimately a cipher – a man of pure surface, no depth. He could be anyone, and everyone could be him. The confusion between characters – colleagues constantly mistaking one another – underscores how interchangeable and soulless their world has become.

The film’s existential chill lies in Bateman’s anonymity: he kills, confesses, and yet no one seems to notice or care. His violence becomes a symptom of a society so self-absorbed that evil can hide in plain sight. In this way, ‘American Psycho’ feels like a dark cousin to ‘Fight Club’ – both explore men desperate to feel something in a consumerist void – and even 2021’s ‘Nobody’, with its theme of violence as a form of self-definition. There’s also an echo of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, in that Bateman never changes, never learns, never finds redemption.

Ultimately, ‘American Psycho’ is less about murder than about meaning – or the absence of it. It’s a razor-sharp portrait of an age where identity itself became a commodity, and where, behind the perfect smile and Armani suit, there may be nothing human left at all.