Judi Dench has called Cats “a waste of goodwill and talent,” according to The Guardian. Her disappointment invites a more useful response than another round of jokes about feline faces: examining what the film’s performers actually have to work with. Beneath its distracting surfaces, this musical contains a story about being noticed, being rejected, and deciding whether someone else deserves another chance.
Tom Hooper’s 2019 adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical has an emotional center worth taking seriously. My judgment is that it repeatedly obscures that center, even when its actors make individual moments affecting. Dench’s Old Deuteronomy, Francesca Hayward’s Victoria, and Jennifer Hudson’s Grizabella suggest a gentler, more coherent film struggling to emerge.
Spoiler warning: This review discusses the central relationships and ending of Cats.
What the Jellicle choice means to its characters
The premise is both simple and strange. A community of cats gathers for the Jellicle Ball, where Old Deuteronomy chooses one of them to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and begin another life. Their performances introduce their personalities while establishing their claims on that extraordinary opportunity.
Viewed from inside this community, the evening is more than a talent contest. Each cat must make a self legible to an audience. Occupation, appetite, reputation, and theatrical confidence become ways of announcing why a life matters. The difficulty for the film is that introducing a personality is not automatically the same as developing a character.
That distinction explains some of its unevenness. A succession of musical portraits can generate pleasure through rhythm, movement, and variation. Once the movie encourages us to follow a newcomer through an unfolding adventure, however, we also expect those encounters to change her. Too often, Victoria seems to be receiving the next presentation rather than making a consequential choice.
Victoria gives the spectacle a human question
Victoria, an abandoned white cat, provides the clearest route into this unfamiliar society. Hayward’s alertness is valuable: her character looks, listens, and hesitates. Those small reactions offer something to hold onto when the surrounding imagery demands that we process too much at once.
Her underlying question is recognizable: can she belong here without being hurt again? That gives her curiosity an emotional cost. Joining a group means learning its customs, but it also means deciding which customs deserve obedience. Her interest in the excluded Grizabella becomes more significant than simply mastering the vocabulary of Jellicle life.
The song Beautiful Ghosts sharpens the difference between the two characters. Grizabella has a past she mourns; Victoria longs for experiences that might someday become a past worth remembering. Their loneliness is related without being identical. That distinction prevents their connection from becoming a generic lesson about two sad people finding each other.
The adaptation is strongest when it allows that relationship to explain its world. It is weaker when exposition and incident crowd out Victoria’s developing judgment. The broader adaptation problem also informs our discussion of why character choices matter when bringing a fantasy world to the screen: imaginative settings need decisions that give their wonders emotional weight.
Grizabella makes acceptance more important than applause
Hudson’s Grizabella supplies the movie’s most direct emotional appeal. Her isolation establishes an uncomfortable contradiction within the tribe. This community celebrates elaborate individuality while withholding kindness from someone whose appearance and history make her difficult to embrace.
Her performance of Memory brings that contradiction into focus. The brief plea “Touch me” reduces the film’s extravagant world to a physical need. Someone who has become an object of judgment asks to be treated as a living presence.
For me, Hudson’s forcefulness works best when understood as Grizabella’s difficulty containing what she feels. The emotion is not elegant or conveniently measured. Nevertheless, the film’s insistence on displaying anguish can narrow the space in which viewers discover their own response. A performance may communicate pain powerfully while its presentation presses the point too hard.
Victoria’s willingness to approach her is therefore crucial. Grizabella needs more than a successful audition. She needs someone to break the pattern of avoidance. The meaningful change begins when another character offers recognition, before any formal decision about her future.
Old Deuteronomy’s warmth carries an unresolved responsibility
Dench gives Old Deuteronomy a reassuring gravity. In a film crowded with characters announcing themselves, she can hold attention through stillness. Her presence makes the ceremony feel consequential even when the surrounding world feels unstable.
Yet the role raises a question the film does not examine very deeply. What responsibility does a benevolent leader bear for exclusion within her community? Old Deuteronomy can recognize worth, but Victoria’s compassion helps expose what the group has failed to see. Authority becomes most convincing when it responds to an example set by someone with little status.
That is an interpretation of the relationship, rather than an explicit argument made by the screenplay. Still, it gives Dench’s character more interest than treating her merely as a kindly judge. Her eventual choice of Grizabella can be read as an acknowledgment that this gathering must value vulnerability as well as display.
The closing address, including “a cat is not a dog,” returns to playful instruction. Dench’s composure lends the line comic dignity. Dramatically, though, the extended farewell pulls attention away from the intimacy the ending has earned. The film continues explaining how to regard cats after its strongest relationship has already demonstrated why regard matters.
Why the visual approach weakens the performances
The trouble with the film’s human-feline bodies is more specific than their unfamiliarity. Their combination of recognizable faces, fur, human movement, and exaggerated surroundings repeatedly draws attention toward construction. Instead of reading a gesture, I find myself examining how its parts fit together.
That distraction matters most when a scene needs emotional continuity. A strange image can be expressive; here, the imagery too often starts a separate conversation from the performance. The viewer’s attention moves between the character’s need and the mechanics of the character’s appearance.
Hayward’s movement and Dench’s stillness suggest contrasting ways to organize that attention. One offers expressive physical precision; the other makes a small response significant. Both need a frame that lets an audience understand what matters. The film does not consistently provide it.
This is why criticism should distinguish effort from effect. Recognizing talent does not require declaring the finished work successful. Equally, an unsuccessful result does not make every contribution worthless. Our reflection on reading film criticism beyond its verdict offers a useful approach: examine how a judgment is supported, not merely how sharply it lands.
The deeper disappointment: compassion becomes conditional
Grizabella’s selection provides the promised release, but it also leaves a revealing tension. Must someone deliver an extraordinary performance before a community will acknowledge her suffering? Read literally, the ceremony risks making compassion another prize to be won.
Victoria offers the more generous answer. Her attention matters because it does not begin with an official verdict. She sees someone the group has learned to overlook. The film’s most persuasive moral action is that small refusal to inherit other people’s contempt.
That is what makes Cats frustrating rather than merely odd. Its strongest characters point toward a moving account of belonging, aging, and mercy, but the filmmaking repeatedly competes with them. The talent remains visible. The disappointment lies in how rarely the whole film gives that talent a clear emotional purpose.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: October 20, 2026 at 06:02:59 PDT (Los Angeles time)
