The women have three fights in the film, and each one is a major affair, messier versions of the knock-down drag-outs that fill "John Wick" end to end. They take place in, respectively, a stairwell, a vacant lot and a forest glade. Attention must be paid to Balint Pinczehelyi, who did the superb fight choreography. The fights are operatic, raucous and extremely violent. They go on so long they practically rival the epic fight scene in "The Quiet Man." Stunt doubles were used, but Oh and Heche are clearly doing a lot of their own stunts, and they are so ferocious it's obvious these characters actually mean to kill one another.
It's common to say that we live in a very literal age, an age where satire is dead, where people credulously share Onion articles on Facebook (and then dig their heels in when it's pointed out to them the article is not real: "Well, it COULD be real." Yes. That's satire.) But every age has its sacred cows, and satire chips away at those cows, at the privileged, at society's unquestioned structures and assumptions. "Catfight" is not at that level (satire is the most difficult genre to do well), and the film's tone is a hard one to sustain. The fights anchor the narrative, as do the various mirroring effects, with dialogue repeating and situations on an eternal loop.
The world Tukel creates is one that is falling apart quickly. The country's atmosphere is that of Total War. The self-involved populace adjusts to it automatically. "Catfight" shows that civilization is an extremely fragile veneer over a pit of seething venom. It doesn't take much for that veneer to crack. And instead of pouring all their rage onto the powers-that-be who really deserve it—the people sending kids off to war, the television host parading a Fart Machine as entertainment, the audience who finds the Fart Machine funny, the entire unfair ugly world—these women turn it on one another.
"Catfight" is not the story of two gals who hate each other and then realize, over appletinis, how much they have in common. Tukel takes that tired cliché and blows it to smithereens. Let's hear it for unvarnished hatred expressed with no holds barred.
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