Tame psychological thriller Greta is saved by French actress Isabelle Huppert, who plays the titular character with blotchy-faced realism and discord.

Huppert's Greta Hideg is a manipulative, mendacious and lonely predator who leaves designer handbags on the subway in the hope of luring naive young women to her isolated New York apartment.

Glowering and maddened, Greta is a force to be reckoned with as the villain in director Neil Jordan's jangly thriller.

Happily, this is a film that launches straight into the action.

Sadly, it spells bad news for anyone caught leaving valuables on public transport.

Chloe Grace Moretz plays naive out-of-towner Frances McCullen, who lives with her girlfriend Erica Penn (Maika Monroe) in a swanky Brooklyn apartment.

Frances waits tables at an up-market restaurant and has a strained relationship with her father (played by Colm Feore) following her mother's death a year earlier.

On the subway, she unwittingly discovers a lone handbag abandoned on a seat.

The "lost and found" office is closed, so Frances resolves to return the bag to its rightful owner the next day.

Lone piano teacher Greta feigns surprise when Frances arrives on her doorstep and delightedly invites her inside for coffee.

There's some unusual banging but Greta calls out to her presumed next door neighbours to ask them to keep the noise down.

She tells Frances in mock frustration, "I swear they are building an ark!"

Greta is so convincing as a lonely widow that in no time, she and Frances strike up a congenial friendship, even visiting a nearby animal shelter to adopt a dog.

They are at Greta's house for dinner when Frances opens a cupboard to look for candles.

Terrifyingly, she discovers a shelf dedicated to handbags that look identical to the one she found on the subway.

On each is a sticky note with a woman's handwritten name and phone number.

Frances' revulsion and fear in this moment, which is a genuine buttock-clencher, amps up the suspense factor.

You just want her to get out of there.

Greta's unflinching pursuit of Frances in the following scenes is disturbing in its unhinged realism.

The last third of the film becomes more camp than frightening as it embodies all the tropes of a stalker-style, victim-villain affair.

Huppert is wonderfully gleeful, irrational and psychopathic as the malevolent black widow.

Grace Moretz plays furrow-browed and frightened with aplomb.

The use of sweeping piano music interchanged with French theatre songs adds to an air of uneasy foreboding.

Unfortunately, there are some weak plot points that really fail to live up to scrutiny.

No stalked New Yorker would return to fish through their accused perpetrator's rubbish bin out of concern for a dog.

It's also hard to believe Frances agrees to meet with Greta in a church after the police become involved.

That said, in what thriller-horror film have you not insisted the heroine was a crackpot for going downstairs to investigate a noise / search for her missing friend / [insert horror trope here] ?

The ending is solid enough and I love that this film's victim, villain and heroine are all women. Bravo.

It's a refreshing take on well-trodden stalker-thriller terrain.