There are two versions of Danish enfant terrible Nicolas Winding Refn: the aesthete and the provocateur.
2011's Ryan Gosling vehicle Drive gave us the aesthete Refn, who synthesized stripped-back 70s thrillers with yearning dream-pop LA noir-like Michael Mann spinning a Chromatics record. 2013's Only God Forgives, also a would-be showcase for the glassy-eyed Gosling, gave us the provocateur: painfully arch mise-en-scene positively lacquered in colored lighting and fussy camera movements met puddle-deep symbolism "about masculinity" (unlike, y'know, every other movie). If nothing else, it made for good Tumblr photosets.
But Refn's never successfully meshed his sensibilities — until now. The Neon Demon tells the story of Jesse (Elle Fanning), a 16-year-old aspiring model who finds that the fashion business can consume you. I don't want to mince words here: This is not a subtle movie; she is actually consumed. As critiques of the beauty industry go, The Neon Demon is about as incisive as Mario Bava's 1964 giallo Blood and Black Lace … which is to say not very.
If you're into allusive or quiet filmmaking, The Neon Demon is going to drive you out of your skull. Refn's approach here is to seduce the audience with aesthetic gilt, luxuriating in long abstract hallucinations full of strobe lights, occult symbols, and lens flares, and then, after ninety-odd minutes, bludgeon them with sudden violence.
That's not to say there's nothing in its head. In fact, as has been argued for decades by people much smarter than me, the appeal of exploitation film is precisely in their bluntness. Their lack of good taste allows them to be upfront with ideas, confronting and provoking the audience in uncomfortable, transgressive ways. And in the case of The Neon Demon, the signifiers it employs are so well-worn as to be off-putting all by themselves: "the fashion industry is superficial" is so hackneyed that it barely even scans as language, let alone a thesis. Cutthroat models, misogynistic designers, pedophiliac motel clerks: they're all stereotypes.
But to mistake the film's setting for its message, or discount its style as mere window dressing is, I'm sorry to say, your loss. Pulling from an impeccably curated list of influences from 70s Eurohorror to 1982's Cat People to the legend of Elizabeth Báthory, Refn manages to provoke, for once, with his aesthetic. The film invites you into its repulsive world until you're sick of its heady, thick atmosphere, like a carrion flower drawing an insect close; cinematographer Natasha Braier (The Rover) shoots the fucking life out of every frame, practically shoving beauty (hey!) down your throat, and composer Cliff Martinez (The Knick) goes absolutely fucking hog-wild on some widdly Goblin-style synthesizer shit.
Elle Fanning in Refn's The Neon Demon
Wild Bunch
No film that elides the money shot so completely as
The Neon Demon can be called desperate to shock. There is wit here, in the screenplay (co-written by playwrights Mary Laws and Polly Stenham in addition to Refn) as well as the deadpan performances of the cast, all of whom perform admirably vicious, Ranier Werner Fassbender-like melodrama in addition to cadaver-assisted masturbation straight from the
Jörg Buttgereit playbook.
And there is a bit of poetry in the film's explicitly Báthory-derived coda, which drastically ruptures the narrative, twisting it into something new and elusive. The scope of the ending, and by extension the film as a whole, widens beyond our previous understanding, refracted through the creamy pearl of the moon and the glossy red of fresh blood.
There's nothing feminist about this film, to be clear. At least not in any digestible way. Refn's version of femininity is a weird, myopic, pathology with a single motivating desire: to best other women in every way. When Jesse finally openly owns her sexuality and the effect it has on others, she's swiftly, brutally punished for her transgression. None of this bears any relationship to reality, but its perversions are fascinating. Part Jean Rollin and part Mulholland Drive, it's a shockingly successful piece of work from a director who, for once, isn't sweating his ass off trying to shock you.
The Neon Demon is now in wide release nationwide.
This article appears in Jun 23-30, 2016.