A successful banker with all the tailored suits and crisply printed business cards money can buy, Patrick Bateman is seemingly on top of the world. Yet this wolf of Wall Street is hiding a dark and ugly side that is driven by his violent urges. As bodies pile up, he begins to lose the plot. Director Mary Harron and co-writer Guinevere Turner adapt Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial novel of the same name into a spectacle that is as funny as it is disturbing and made all the more memorable by Christian Bale’s killer performance. While the discourse around the film’s release was mainly focused on its graphic violence, its cult following has continued to grow and mutate. Once a satire about the excessive materialism of the 1980s, snippets of Bateman’s facial contortions have become some of the most enduring memes in the past decade, ironically signalling a new era of toxic internet culture.

Mary Harron (b. 1953, Canada) premiered her first feature I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) in Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. The production of her next film, American Psycho (2000), was met with various obstacles due to the source material’s controversial nature. She later directed The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), a biopic of the famous pinup model.