And there are directors whose work you eventually grow skeptical of after one too many missed opportunities. Case in point: Anything by Guillermo del Toro since 2008’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
Nicolas Winding Refn is not such a director. He eschews conventional film tropes. He seems to favor style over substance, but the style on display in his movies is breathtaking to behold. And he literally defies categorization.
He’s made five films since 2008 and not one of them is anything like the other. And despite finding mainstream success and mass name recognition following his 2011 breakout, Drive, he has refused to play by Hollywood’s expectations. Only God Forgives in 2013 was a brutal, self-indulgent, nearly unintelligible action flick. And his latest, The Neon Demon, is essentially an over-the-top exploitation horror film – if that film was a broad homage to Dario Argento as envisioned by Terrence Malick.
Imagine Showgirls, if Nomi Malone had killed and eaten Cristal Connors.
Trying to discern whether The Neon Demon is any good, however, is completely subjective.
BVB: Blood Violence and Babes loved its excesses and audacious refusal to conform to any established filmmaking rules. A lot of people will likely immediately hate it and label it as pretentious hooey.
But here’s the thing – The Neon Demon is pretentious.
It’s also wildly ambitious, ridiculously over-indulgent and mind-numbingly impenetrable at times.
But I promise you this: it is one of the most hauntingly beautiful movies you’ve ever seen. It’s a gorgeous Grand Guignol with bursts of bloody, brilliant and breathtaking chutzpah.
Winding Refn isn’t content to merely savage the vanity of youth. He eviscerates the entire modeling industry — from photographers and designers to makeup artists and talent agents — who foster and encourage young women to forego their innocence in a desperate bid for adulation.
The Neon Demon opens with an extended, reverse dolly shot of 16-year-old Jesse (Elle Fanning) draped over an ornate couch, her throat slashed. Fanning looks genuinely dead, but that’s the magic of her model super powers. Her natural talent is light years ahead of her seasoned competitors, which is why they all hate her — or, at least, Gigi and Sarah. Only their friend, makeup artist Ruby (Jena Malone), seems to appreciate and care for Jesse’s well-being.
Fueled by a propulsive synth-heavy score by Cliff Martinez (who also composed Drive and Only God Forgives), Winding Refn bombards viewers with an accelerating array of visceral, deviant imagery:
- Sleazy motel owner Hank (Keanu Reeves) sneaking into Jesse’s room for a fetishistic game of oral knife play.
- Jesse masturbating while fantasizing about Ruby engaging in necrophilia with a cadaver.
- Jesse battling Gigi and Sarah in calamitous catfight with butcher knives and blunt objects.
- Ruby languishing in a freshly-dug grave, smoking while completely nude, and later giving birth to a torrent of blood.
- Gigi vomiting up an eyeball while hoarsely screaming, “I need to get her out of me!”
What does it all mean? Who knows. Who cares! Winding Refn seems intent only on making his audience as uncomfortable as possible — he deliberately holds some scenes a frame or two too long to ratchet up the voyeuristic awkwardness that he is trying to impart.
At one point, Jesse stops to sum up her existence: "I know what I look like. Women would kill to look like this."
The reality is they would do much worse, even devour her whole, to have what she has.
And that about sums up The Neon Demon — and our current morally-bankrupt, fame-obsessed culture — perfectly.
The Neon Demon
Genre: Avant-garde horror
Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn
Run time: 118 minutes
Rating: R
Format: Blu-Ray, available now
The Stuff You Care About:
Hot chicks – Oh yeah. Jena Malone can color my corpse any day.
Nudity – Gratuitous.
Gore – Gratuitous.
Drug use – Yes.
Bad Guys/Killers – The pretty, vain and vapid girls.
Buy/Rent – Buy it.
Released – September 27, 2016
That’s not the only thing missing. There’s a point early on in the film when you realize nearly 20 minutes has passed with barely a single spoken word of dialogue.
The Demolisher doesn’t suffer from the silence. Propelled by Glenn Nicholls’ retro-influenced score, Carrer’s film is unnervingly precise in its full-throttle examination of PTSD and the impact it has on people who hope for a cathartic release by exacting extreme retaliatory violence.
Death Wish, this ain’t.
There is no criminal crisis affecting the unnamed city where Bruce (the extraordinarily intense Ry Barrett, who also co-wrote the script), a TV repairman, and his wife Samantha live. Samantha used to be a cop before she ran up against an unnamed gang of vicious youth who are only identified by a crazed graffiti-styled monkey image on the back of their leather jackets. The gang crippled Samantha, leaving her in a wheelchair, forced to depend on Bruce for her every need.
The impact of essentially losing his wife has left Bruce seething with rage. He is incapable of ordinary conversation. He cannot hold his wife without being gripped with unbridled anger. Even her attempts to coax a tender moment, whether cuddled together in a bath or trying to go on a date to the movies, find Bruce practically crippled himself by an uncontrollable need to seek revenge.
In the cannon of vigilante movies that have populated exploitation cinema for decades, only James Wan’s Death Sentence comes close to channeling the same nihilistic free-fall that slowly squeezes Bruce in a stone-cold embrace.
To make sense of his despair, Bruce resorts to donning a military-style uniform complete with Billy club and protective helmet and takes to the streets, hunting down anyone he can find who dares wear the mark of the monkey gang.
In a sad twist of irony, however, even the bone-shattering beat-downs that he delivers aren’t enough to slake his thirst for justice. Bruce begins to spiral out of control, losing his perspective on who rightly deserves punishment. He kills a customer when he mistakenly believes the customer has uttered a derogatory slur against Samantha. And then he sets his sights on Marie, an innocent woman who happens to find Bruce’s wedding band and necklace chain at the movie theater.
What distinguishes The Demolisher and truly elevates it from grindhouse to arthouse is its surprisingly intelligent script, which subverts traditional genre conventions and forces viewers to consider whether Bruce is the hero or the villain of his own story. At times, the true manipulator appears to be Samantha who knows exactly what Bruce is doing and continues to prod him into action by casually justifying his bloodlust with veiled encouragement.
The Demolisher’s third act — its brilliant, blood-soaked denouement — plays like an extended 8-bit side-scrolling beat-em-up videogame from the 1980s. As Bruce stalks Marie across deserted city streets and through multiple building levels, their escalating hand-to-hand combat provides an epiphany of sorts, even as bullet blasts shred skin and broken bodies pile up.
The Demolisher, much like The Neon Demon, re-imagines traditional genre cinema in a way that’s both utterly original and breathtakingly ambitious.
The Demolisher
Genre: Thriller/Action
Directed by: Gabriel Carrer
Run time: 86 minutes
Rating: Unrated
Format: Blu-Ray, available now
The Stuff You Care About:
Hot chicks – Yes.
Nudity – Brief.
Gore – Yes.
Drug use – No.
Bad Guys/Killers – Can an anti-hero also be a bad guy?
Buy/Rent – Buy it.
Released – October 4, 2016
This article appears in Oct 13-20, 2016.