[118 minutes. R. Director: Nicolas Winding Refn]
The world of fashion modeling is ripe with metaphorical potential. And while nobody would seem more suited to bring a new and unique angle to this topic, Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon is a conundrum that piggybacks off some of the best examples of this interesting subgenre, while infusing the proceedings with a variety of scattered horror fruits and nuts.
While theories are left ambiguous in Demon, Refn posits that models could be blank-eyed zombies; machine-tooled cyborgs calibrated for a world hung up on the concept of physical perfection; aliens beamed down to Earth from another planet; or bloodthirsty, Elizabeth Bathory-styled vampires looking to maintain their Forever 21 looks by any means necessary.
This is the type of film that Austin Powers, lulled into submission by the lethal Fembots, would love. It presents a paradoxical world of beauty and danger where mystery and piercing color schemes are the true aesthetic currency, something that comes as a given from the man who gave us the divisive, style-drenched panoramas of Drive and Only God Forgives.
Considering Refn’s icy, meticulous attention to color and symmetry within his shot compositions, the match of creator to subject is appropriate. Demon, a brazenly unclassifiable film that swims in a steaming genre soup is, like its characters, marked by the exclusivity of club rules. Narratively dense, it runs nearly 2 hours and follows a myriad of story threads, few of which are met with satisfying conclusions. The ending, which has all the stylistic trademarks of a Calvin Klein fragrance ad, contributes only more thickness to a well-muddied narrative path.
But for all intents and purposes, the type of story Demon tells will determine whether it will pique individual viewer interest: following the well-established narrative catalysts of films where bright-eyed, beautiful young women seek fame (Starry Eyes; Black Swan; and especially Mulholland Drive), it borrows freely and unabashedly from its forebears, while the director inverts expectations by gorging style over substance. This approach tows a tricky line between virtue and self-indulgence, and will be a point of contention for people unversed in Refn’s hyper-stylized aesthetics. For a director whose previous film was jeered at Cannes, he seems to be going for the jugular in widening the gap between his fans and detractors.
Lulled by the shifting color hues on a velvet surface (or the surface of a distant planet, who knows?), the opening credits bear a tongue-in-cheek “NWR” watermark, as if Refn is presenting us with his 2016 entry in the cinema fashion wars. He then progresses into a macabre tableau centering on Jesse (a deliberately somnambulant Elle Fanning), a 16-year old who has fled small-town Georgia and her deceased parents to establish a name for herself in Los Angeles. In a surreal string of events, Ruby (Jena Malone, oozing steely authority throughout) takes Jesse to a party, underscored by a strobe-lit performance art piece, and introduces her to Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee), two wide-eyed, highly competitive models.
While the performances are uniformly excellent, Refn’s presentation of his mostly-female cast is problematic. In Drive, women were presented as either passive spectators to male-centered action, cannon fodder, or topless eye candy; in Only God Forgives, women were presented as passive sex objects with no function outside of fulfilling the desires of the men of the piece, or gender reversals on monstrous villains (for as ruthless and brilliant as Kristin Scott Thomas is in that film, it is a role that could’ve been inhabited by a male with few script changes). For example, there is a shower scene in Demon that provokes a disconnect between prurience and narrative necessity; photographed in slow motion, in pale lighting, and accompanied by Cliff Martinez’s otherworldly synth score, it contains important cutaway shots to a specific character’s point of view, but its protracted nature seems to be Refn staging a deliberately leg-crossing sequence of sheer excess. While the film shunts its male characters to the periphery (despite a greater significance being teased for all), the women are not necessarily “strong” by design or default – if anything, the vagaries of the script leave them as more signifiers and symbols than fully fleshed-out beings (which, to add to the frustration, is appropriate for the story). My perspective: the icy presentation of femininity, beauty, and sexuality synthesizes well enough with Refn’s aesthetic fixation on surfaces (both literal and figurative) for the lack of texture to make sense on a narrative level.
The recurring imagery of Demon, in another bit of obvious aesthetic deliberation, uses mirrors to emphasize the illusory nature of the modeling business (many over-the-shoulder shots, or off-sided glimpses of characters casting distorted reflections; and yes, a bathroom mirror gets shattered at one point). The actors’ reliance on wide-eyed glares is vapid in a way that drains the sexuality from the film’s amorous moments; in fact, there is a jaw-dropping sequence near the end that creates a blunt visual metaphor of beauty as a form of sexual violation, ice-cold to the touch. Complementing this further is Ruby’s ornate yet empty-feeling mansion – all long, echoing corridors and high-ceilinged rooms, recalling the sets of many classic Universal and Hammer horrors.
“My mother said I’m dangerous,” Jesse intones to Ruby near the end, and one wonders at the implications of that statement. Despite top billing and her visage being front and center in the film’s ad campaign, Fanning comes across as a cipher in her own story, while the more powerful (on the surface, anyway) women manipulate her for their own ends. With the images of penetration, consumption, and birth that mark the film’s closing minutes, the facial blankness and soft-toned naivete of Jesse leaves one’s mind venturing into the “what ifs” that spring up from her minimal backstory and hallucinatory initiation into the high-profile, high-cost world of high fashion. If there are answers to be found within The Neon Demon, none of them come easy, but the decoding process is part of its lethal charm.
4 out of 5 stars
Crash Analysis Support Team:
Jonny Numb (aka Jonathan Weidler) measures his life in coffee spoons, and writes reviews once every couple years at numbviews.livejournal.com. He co-hosts THE LAST KNOCK horror podcast, and can be found on Twitter and Letterboxd @JonnyNumb.
(Photo from gds.it.)