American Psycho | Toronto-Dominion Centre — Where Pierce & Pierce Kept Its Bloodless Floor

Patrick Bateman's office has a real address, and it is not in Manhattan. Mary Harron shot the Pierce & Pierce floors inside the TD Bank Tower at 66 Wellington Street West, the black spine of Mies van der Rohe's Toronto-Dominion Centre. It was the right lie to tell. Mies finished the first towers here between 1967 and 1969 — bronze-tinted glass, matte black steel mullions welded flush to the skin, a grid so exact that the building refuses to be interesting. That is the texture of the whole film. Surfaces that give nothing back.

Come in from Wellington Street on a weekday and the lobby is open to anyone: travertine, glass, a ceiling that seems to have been decided by an accountant with taste. Nobody stops you. Nobody looks up. The elevator banks swallow people in dark coats at a rate that has not changed since 1999, and the men coming out of the revolving doors at eight in the morning are still wearing the same three suits in the same two greys.

The best correction to all that is thirty seconds away. On the plaza between the towers lie seven bronze cows — Joe Fafard's The Pasture, installed in 1985 on a patch of grass at the foot of the black glass. They are life-sized, folded down on their knees, entirely uninterested in the banking district happening above them. Fafard put them there as a deliberate insult to the seriousness of the place.

Stand between the cows and the tower and look up the face of 66 Wellington until the lines start to repeat. Then look back down at an animal lying in the grass with its eyes half shut. The film spends two hours trying to make that joke.