Neon Demon review: Refn's horror-themed fashion shoot sick joke of a film

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This was published 7 years ago

Neon Demon review: Refn's horror-themed fashion shoot sick joke of a film

By Jake Wilson
Updated

★★★

"Beauty isn't everything, it's the only thing," says a fashion designer (Alessandro Nivola) in The Neon Demon, adapting a philosophy more frequently heard in the world of sports. He appears to be speaking for the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive), a specialist in the superficial whose trick is to take the tropes of scuzzy genre films and recreate them from an arty distance.

The film's heroine is Jesse (Elle Fanning), a teenager who arrives in Los Angeles hoping for fame as a model. An innocent in relation to her surroundings, she nonetheless grasps that her vulnerable beauty is the one thing she has to sell. As it turns out, everybody wants a piece of her: would-be mentors, bitchy rivals, lowlifes like a predatory motel manager played by Keanu Reeves. Gradually it becomes clear that the place she's come to is a kind of hell, ruled by demons in a more than metaphoric sense.

Jesse (Elle Fanning) is a teenager who arrives in Los Angeles hoping for fame as a model.

Jesse (Elle Fanning) is a teenager who arrives in Los Angeles hoping for fame as a model.Credit: Madman

Whatever Refn is up to here, he's hardly making a serious protest about the exploitation of young women: the LA depicted here belongs strictly to mythology rather than real life. Nor does The Neon Demon really qualify as a horror film, though it's closer to horror than any other genre. As Refn winkingly implies in the opening sequence, it's more like a horror-themed fashion shoot, making stylish use of reprocessed macabre images.

Nearly everything in the film is a cliche, but the feeling of tacky inauthenticity is part of the point. What Refn is aiming for is a seductive, druggy vibe, dreamlike but also familiar. There's a psychedelic intensity to the colours: Fanning's blonde hair, the blue of a moonlit swimming pool, blood red. Cliff Martinez' electronic score, with its low inexorable beats and ethereal shimmers, parallels a plot that pits evil against innocence while viewing the two as mutually dependent.

The Neon Demon wouldn't be much of a movie without Fanning, a precocious talent who has appeared in movies practically since she was born. Though she has the uncanny beauty the script calls for, she's more than a tool in Refn's audiovisual scheme. About 17 at the time of the shoot, she's able to seem both artless and sophisticated, a little girl and a full-grown woman – an ambiguity all the more unsettling in the knowledge that she's given similar performances in the past.

Like other Refn films, The Neon Demon makes us wait a long time for the plot to get moving. Then things turn very nasty very quickly, as if to say that beneath the appearance of beauty all you'll find is literal blood and guts. But the "shocking" scenes are hardly more persuasive than the fake blood shown at the outset: the film is too committed to its own emptiness to leave much room for emotion or lingering mystery. The only puzzle is how far Refn is laughing up his sleeve the whole time: the ending is outrageous in such a calculated way it can hardly be taken as anything but a sick joke.

Nicolas Winding Refn's film resembles a kind of hell where the colours have a psychedelic intensity.

Nicolas Winding Refn's film resembles a kind of hell where the colours have a psychedelic intensity.

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