“I believe in taking care of myself, in a balanced diet, in a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I’ll put on an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack, I use a deep-pore cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water-activated gel cleanser. Then a honey-almond body scrub, and on the face, an exfoliating gel scrub. Then I apply a herb-mint facial mask, which I leave on for ten minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out, and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm, followed by final moisturizing protective lotion.”

Until the narrator veers off to describing himself as an abstraction of a human being who’s not really there, these words would sound at home in any given TikTok or YouTube tutorial about morning skin-care routines or wellness tips. And actually, the not-really-there part tracks, too, even if no influencer in their right mind would precisely say so. Truly, Patrick Bateman, despite being a creature of the ’80s, was also well ahead of his time.

Bateman is a banker and also maybe a serial killer; the lead character in the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho, he was made flesh 25 years ago by Christian Bale, in Mary Harron’s film version. The movie isn’t as graphically gory or boundary-pushing as the Ellis novel, which includes rape, cannibalism, and necrophilia that the movie keeps largely off-screen. (In an inevitability that really drives home the American in the title, the cuts the movie needed to assure an R rating were for sex, not violence.) Yet American Psycho never feels as if it’s been softened, or turned into a more standard-issue horror film, even when the lead character is taking an axe to Jared Leto. (Between this movie, Requiem for a Dream, and Fight Club, mutilating Leto was simply the style at the time.) Harron and co-writer Guinevere Turner fine tune the material into less of a head trip – though if anything, it may be more ambiguous how many of Patrick’s murders are actually happening in the real world – and more of a dark comedy about how capitalism has reduced this man to a thin shell that barely contains a series of childish and/or psychotic impulses. (And, in an ironic twist, Bateman has become something of an aspirational figure in the eyes of “Wall Street bros,” as Harron lamented in a recent interview.)

Hey, speaking of which: “Is that Donald Trump’s car?” Bateman distractedly asks Courtney (Samantha Mathis), his mistress, though there’s little discernible difference between his relationship with her and with his would-be fiancée (Reese Witherspoon). Bale’s Bateman has a Trumpian yearning for a particularly empty form of more, preferring the trappings of wealth and endlessly petty status symbols – it’s easy to imagine Trump developing a little sweat over someone else’s nicer business cards, as Bateman does in one famous scene – with a vastly different presentation.

That’s the most striking aspect that roots this movie in a different time period 25 years later, whether the 1980s where it’s set or the turn of the millennium when it was made: Bateman’s hollow attempts at respectability. At one dinner, he meets a colleague’s antisemitic remarks with a scolding so bland it almost sounds sarcastic; later, he rattles off a laundry list of generic social goals (ending racism, advancing women’s rights, fighting poverty) that plenty of bankers today would call the height of wokeness. His attempts to sound like a human being through enthusiastic, ad-copy-ready blurbing of Huey Lewis and the News or Whitney Houston betray an obvious desire to fit into polite society. Today’s masters of finance, tech, or our nuclear weapons demand not just power, but the freedom to flaunt it, wield it, and describe it in whatever nasty terms they dictate. Today, a guy in Patrick Bateman’s position wouldn’t let someone mishear “murders and executions” as “mergers and acquisitions.” He’d repeat himself, insisting on acknowledgment.

Then again, that lack of acknowledgment may also be what turns this movie into Patrick Bateman’s hell, brilliantly embodied by Bale. Towards the end of the movie, Bateman goes on a killing spree and then a confession spree, and nobody believes him; people scarcely believe that he’s himself, much less guilty of anything. The last line of the movie as the camera pushes into Bateman’s furrowed brow: “This confession has meant nothing.” American Psycho understands that it’s too much to hope that these people will be caught or stopped – no matter the particulars of capitalist hell they’re inflicting on the world. But maybe their indifference and moral vacuity can at least echo back to them, a plastic-sealed, face-wrapped horror movie of their own making.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.