The Neon Demon (2016)

The Neon Demon (R)

"..treats objects like women, man."

It's a story as old as Los Angeles itself, a young girl looking for fame and fortune, innocent to the world, runs into the dark belly of the entertainment industry (LITERALLY!) in Director Nicholas Winding Refn's (Drive) gorgeously weird film, The Neon Demon.

Stunning cinematography, beautifully dangerous hellcat women, electro-smoky pulsing soundtrack, stilted Kubrick-like dialog, strange symbols and visions, and that one scene: Oh, that show stopping Scene!  They all make up the brunt of Refn's attack on the fashion industry, that it exists and how it cannibalizes (heh) the female form.  Early on, Elle Fanning's Jesse, the young lovely but impressionable youth who is the star of the film, is told "to always say she is 19.  18 is too on the nose."  This is shorthand for her situation, shorthand for the entire enterprise of film and subject.  She is quickly embraced by the industry's entrepreneurs, drunk in by the male gaze, and vilified by it's older, less natural looking models.  Even her new friend Ruby (Jena Malone) seems to have a strange fascination with Jesse, who soon gets caught up in her own hype and gets led down a dark walkway of doom.

Special attention must be made to the soundtrack by Cliff Martinez, once again joining Refn after scoring Drive.  Easily half of this film's enjoyment can be derived from the musical landscape of electronic moods, from 80s synth to edgy Pop Diva.  It matches all the gore and glitter perfectly and the film uses it extremely effectively.  Many will rewatch the film just as a means to experience the sweet dark marriage of visuals and sound.  The use of light, the shadowy early hours, the flash bulbs and mirrors, the cinematography is just as nuanced and beautiful as the audio and constructs a nightmare world of gloss and reflection for us to watch Jesse lose herself in.

ND will be too slow for many, too little viscera for others, the third act too toe-curling intense for anyone sane.  But for some the experience of wallowing through this blood bath will be sublime.  Slow, brooding and methodical, The Neon Demon mystifies for a long period and then suddenly drives it's point home with a pair scissors.  It's almost a twisted giallo mashup, like Diana Ross' Mahogany remixed by Dario Argento.  This is Refn at his most feminist, the men in the film treat women as mere meat puppets for their cameras, and the ones that don't the women themselves push away (Keanu Reeves himself has a small yet significant part).  The expected fashion cat fights, the women infighting by snidely brutalizing each other, these eye rolling cliches all happen.  But there is a deeper layer to it, and once that layer gets scratched and bleeds all hell breaks loose.  It's Refn's interest in not exploiting the women on screen who are being exploited that makes his intentions very clear, so beautifully on the nose it cuts it off to spite it face artistically.

8.5 You'll Never Look at Funeral Homes the Same Way Again out of 10 (GREAT)