Welcome to One to Watch – an ongoing guide to film. In each edition, I’ll be recommending one movie which deserves a place on your watchlist.
From overlooked gems to modern classics, One to Watch is all about discovering your next great watch, which today is the psychological thriller… Copycat (1995).
In Copycat, a series of murders is taking place across San Francisco, with homicide detective M.J. Monahan on the case. Problem is, Monahan can’t seem to get a real beat on the crimes and needs some assistance.
She reaches out to Dr. Helen Hudson – a specialist in the field and someone who has firsthand experience dealing with a killer. Hudson was previously cornered by a serial killer in a brutal attack, which she survived, but it left her severely agoraphobic.
After taking a look at the case, Hudson spots a worrying connection between the murder victims. Whoever is committing the crimes is taking inspiration from prolific killers of the past.
Directed by Jon Amiel (Sommersby, Entrapment), and starring Holly Hunter as Monahan and Sigourney Weaver as Hudson, Copycat is a thoroughly engrossing, wonderfully compelling dark crime thriller from the mid-1990s. It operates in a similar wheelhouse as films such as Kiss the Girls (1997) or The Bone Collector (1999), but is arguably a much stronger picture, and is helped along by the excellent pairing of Hunter and Weaver.
And Copycat is ’One to Watch’ because despite how good it is, the film often gets overlooked. For a long time Copycat was not readily available on disc, digital, or streaming, so for a while it faded into the background while many of its peers from the same genre took the spotlight.
The odd thing is, Copycat was a successful film when it debuted back in 1995. The critical response was strong, the box office was decent, and it rented very well on VHS – so it certainly didn’t get missed.
But time moved on, Copycat didn’t get talked about as much as other films, and it didn’t get passed on to the next generation in the same way other movies did. However, fans have continued to champion the picture for decades and rightly so.
Copycat is at times grim and gritty, has a similar vibe to The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and it really excels when Hunter and Weaver are on screen together. The 1990s delivered some killer thrillers, and Copycat is one of them.
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Thank you for stopping by It’s A Stampede! to read this post about the One to Watch. For more posts be sure to check out the recommended reads below.
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