The Neon Demon

Year: 2016
Genre: Horror
Directed: Nicolas Winding Refn
Stars: Elle Fanning, Abbey Lee, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Karl Glusman, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks, Jamie Clayton, Alessandro Nivola, Desmond Harrington, Taylor Marie Hill
Production: Bold Films

"She's a diamond among a sea of glass," says Alessandro Nivola's unnamed fashion designer. He says this to describe the virginal, Bambi-esque Jesse (Fanning) whose arrival in Los Angeles has turned many, many heads. Before her entrance, Nivola and a few models sit idly on the leather backs of a upscale restaurant booth. He's reciting passages of Macbeth and waxing poetically about how "beauty isn't the most important thing, it's the only thing."

The Neon Demon is a Russ Meyer-inspired Hollywood sleaze fable if it were told from the dour sets of the Grand Guignol. Jesse comes to Tinseltown to become a model and despite being only 16, she lands a deal of a lifetime with a major agency. In-between shoots she lives in a trashy motel headed by the irredeemable Hank (Keanu). Seemingly her only allies are kinda-sorta boyfriend Dean (Glusman) and makeup artist Ruby (Malone) who first ferries her to her first professional shoot. Everyone else seems to either want to be her or want to eat her alive.

Due in large part by reexamination of director Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives (2013), critics seem to be pulling their punches concerning this nasty little fairy-tale. It seems that everyone (including yours truly) is trying to look for deeper meaning under the grotesque giallo horror set-pieces and delirious fretwork. After all, Refn keen eye was once heralded as comparable to that of Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick however never sacrificed narrative for the sake of a nice shot. His frames always has an economy of style that balanced strong cinematography, thematically salient storytelling and unbridled experimentation. Refn's Neon Demon on the other hand is much like it's protagonist, pretty and rather shallow. There's nothing thematically that you can't pry away from the film that isn't already skin deep. It's about vanity; it's about pride and the literate references to Shakespeare, Elizabeth Bathory and Kubrick himself are but filler.

Gotta love them Borowczyk flicks!

Of course what is on the screen is pretty breathtaking; recreating the same gloss and sheen that covers high-end fashion magazines. The hallucinatory horror that dominates Jesse's warped and lonely world conjures comparisons to the sexual cavalcade of Walerian Borowczyk's oeuvre. Then there's the lateral tracking shots which accomplish the same uneasiness captured by a Kubrickian zoom only drawing less attention to itself.

Yet every attempt at technical subtlety is completely pulled apart at the seems by Refn's on-the-nose symbolism. Within the first fifteen minutes of the film, models discuss at length the meaning behind the names of lipstick contrasting the fractured female identity with the blunted phrase "are you food or sex?" The consistent use of the color red and the triangle as an emblem of the fairer sex are so painfully, abstrusely obvious that the film honestly would have been better served if Jesse spontaneously grew Icarus wings.

It's a shame that Refn couldn't give the same nuance deconstruction of femininity he gave to masculinity in Drive (2011) and to a lesser extent, every other film he's ever done. I admire his temerity but I question his choice to use the same narrative pacing and visceral bloodletting we've seen in his other works. While exploring new themes he makes no attempt to bend in their direction. He doesn't create a new world, he simply adds a wing to his old ones and expects you not to notice. Despite a visual sophistication, every frame is loaded with the judgment of a five-year-old trying broccoli for the first time. It's a movie that's less of an exploration than a house of horrors; Refn being the carnival barker that yells "Isn't this gross, isn't that gross, aren't you gross for enjoying it?"

Yes, this movie is far more excessive than this!

In an interview discussing her role for the film, Elle Fanning compared the themes of the film with the idle hands of a generation ensnared by Instagram. "If you think of dead, altered images as beautiful, how do you relate to a real person?" It's an idea worth exploring; are we really more in love with images than people? With the hilarity of Popstar (2016) and the arrival of Nerve (2016) later this year, it's good to see the movie industry is willing to skewer self-absorption. In the case of Neon Demon, I ask why we need to retch while doing so? Frankly I was expecting something more than a monstrous and excessive retooling of Zardoz (1974).

Final Grade: F