Neon Demon, The (2016)
Starring Elle Fanning, Christina Hendricks, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee
Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
Set in the cutthroat world of high fashion, The Neon Demon follows an innocent small-town runaway named Jesse (Fanning) through the seedy City of Angels as she rises to short-lived fame. The sexy 16-year-old is swooped up quickly by demons in high heels – from Jan (Hendricks), the top agent who signs her, to makeup artist and new BFF Ruby (Malone) to frenemy fellow models Gigi and Sarah (Heathcote, Lee).
Or is Sarah not as artless as she seems? Even as her youth and vitality are devoured by the perfection-obsessed fashionistas who will take any means necessary to get what she has, the new catwalk queen becomes defiant and turns out to be quite calculating.
Shock peddler Nicolas Winding Refn – whose most recent arty misfire was Only God Forgives – once again stabs cinema with his steely knives, but he can’t quite kill the beast. (No Eagles in the movie… but there is a cougar – of the wild cat variety, I mean. Just one of the many metaphors sprinkled throughout the subtext.) All of the colors and shapes are there in Refn’s bag of tricks, but they are more mathematical and architectural than poetic or passionate. There’s a cold, distant shallowness to the characters which keeps one from connecting to them on a visceral level.
On a visual level, however, The Neon Demon is killer. Of course Refn is a genius in his own right (I’m the one who liked Only God Forgives – and I should mention, if his name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s also the director of Bronson, Valhalla Rising, and Drive) – but upon seeing this aggressively arty opus, one cannot help but draw comparisons to Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Mario Bava, and especially Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani.
The Neon Demon is gushing with gory glam and oozing beautiful baroque sleaze from its every pore. However, horror fans should know that it doesn’t truly embrace our genre until near the very end. There, you will be thrust into a narcissistic necrophiliac netherworld that’s parts Elizabeth Bathory legend and Investigation Discovery’s “Beauty Queen Murders”… and then something wholly its own.
Beware, ADD viewers: There are long, drawn-out silent scenes punctuated only occasionally with stylized, stilted dialogue; non-sequiturs; and yes, vapid exchanges between self-loathing/self-loving models. You certainly won’t see the dour Danish director on “Funny or Die” anytime soon, but you might get a chuckle or two from the sublimely strange and quirky climax.
If you like this sort of thing (I do), then please see The Neon Demon on the big screen.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
