The Room levels of insanity in every aspect of how the film is put together; I could give you a dozen examples of the most wrong-headed things that happen (robotic cockroaches with human faces! Cats leaping and gliding back down so slowly that it feels like they’re underwater! Letting Idris Elba sing!), and still leave you with three times that many wonderful surprises to come. And every one of them, in the moment that it occurs, feels like the worst thing you’ve ever seen, while simultaneously being the most delightful. This is a work of limitless surprises and pure creativity: whatever the ever-living shit was going through Hooper’s mind as he came up with the staging, it did not arrive there because he wanted to take the easy route. And however it was possible for this many incredibly talented actors to winded up tethered to this project, they all seem to be having a fucking blast committing as hard as possible to one of the worst conceits in the history of cinematic anthropomorphism. It is a giddy, joyful piece of filmmaking, unashamedly proud of everything it’s doing, and almost because everything it’s doing is so deeply misguided, that joy is so potent it’s contagious. I was blissed out the whole time, like being falling-down drunk only without any melancholic or angry overtones and no hangover. This is a film of unrelenting upbeat energy, so horrible that it’s only really possible to react to it with a kind of delirious manic good cheer. I cannot say that we’d be better of if more movies were like Cats, but the world would be a hell of a lot more interesting.