Neon Demon, The (2016) [Blu-ray]
Horror | Thriller

Tagline: The wicked die young

When aspiring model Jesse moves to Los Angeles, her youth and vitality are devoured by a group of beauty-obsessed women who will take any means necessary to get what she has.

Storyline: When aspiring model Jesse moves to Los Angeles, her youth and vitality are devoured by a group of beauty-obsessed women who will take any means necessary to get what she has.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson, September 29, 2016 In his tenth completed feature, Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn fixates his cinematic gaze on the neon lights and high-end fashion world of present-day Los Angeles. While Refn did not attend a fashion show until working on The Neon Demon, he directed commercials and made fashion advertisements for designer brands like Gucci, H&M, Hennessey, and YXL. In The Neon Demon's fashion shoots and shows, Refn's often garish mise-en-scène and solid contrast of light and dark spaces will likely intensify the style versus substance debate that critics have argued over, particularly the Dane's recent films. I believe that Refn achieves a successful balance of form and content here. He has always been an underrated writer, his laconic and terse dialog frequently upstaged by gorgeous day and nighttime visuals. Refn's script is no doubt enhanced by two female playwrights who provide an added feminine perspective into the fashion sense of the LA models. (Mary Laws and Polly Stenham share screenwriting credits with Refn.)

Note that this review includes minor spoilers.

Jesse (Elle Fanning) is a shy sixteen-year-old who has recently moved from a small town in Georgia to LA to pursue a modeling career. Jesse is accompanied by her new friend Dean (Karl Glusman), an amiable and nice-looking photographer whose snapshots have garnered Jesse the attention of a local modeling agency. Following a quite striking photo shoot that opens the film, Ruby (Jena Malone), a makeup artist who was probably once herself a model, confronts Jesse in the dressing room. Ruby becomes a hybrid mentor/muse to Jesse. She introduces Jesse to two of the agency's top models, the blondes Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee). In the scenes between these young ladies, it is not so much what is said, or even how it is articulated, but how the models project themselves to each other that is important to Refn. For example, one model asks Jesse if she misses being away from her parents but enunciates the words in monotone and in the most robotic manner. When Jesse meets with Roberta Hoffmann (Christina Hendricks), the head of the agency, she falls prey to this salesperson's pitch that a perfect body will get her into as many shows as she wishes. But Jesse's naiveté precludes her from realizing that scintillating beauty and a perfect body can diminish, however slightly, into ephemeral beauty and a disposable body.

While The Neon Demon is a film that Refn can call his own, it sometimes parallels the female rivalries in different professions depicted in prior films, e.g. the two competing ballerinas in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010) as well as the head honcho and her protégée in Brian De Palma's Passion (2012). Another reference to a De Palma work is apropos. In The Neon Demon (the first half, especially), the ladies become jealous and envious of Jesse's newfound "model as superstar" status. But beforehand, when Jesse is an unspoiled innocent girl, Refn establishes a bullying milieu in which the ladies verbally assault her purity. Jesse is much like a twenty-first century version of Carrie White (without the pious maternal influence). Besides bullying, Refn reckons with two taboo subjects (which I will not disclose) that Hollywood would never touch these days.

"I'm pretty, and I can make money off 'pretty'."

The fashion scene, as well as the more unsavory parts of society, may be populated by attractive young women but as Refn reminds the audience, it is still heavily masculine and ruled by men. This representation cuts across class lines throughout the film. Because she has little money following her move out West, Jesse lodges in a porous low-rent motel in Pasadena. After she encounters a problem in her room, Jesse asks Hank (Keanu Reeves), the motel manager, to intervene. Possibly going through a midlife crisis, Hank is truculent and hopelessly crude to Jesse and Dean. (This is perhaps Reeves's darkest character since 2000 when he played bad guys in The Gift and The Watcher). Jesse also has more emotionally distant relationships with the men she works for. The steely and stone-faced Jack (Desmond Harrington) is more of a pornographer than a fashion photographer, making Jesse up as a painted figurine and treating her like a a fetishized object. Jesse also has very little to say to the mustachioed fashion designer (Alessandro Nivola), who exchanges barbs with Dean over the values of external and internal beauty.

Within this extravagant and morally repugnant society, Refn explores one of his favorite visual tropes: the conflation of a fantasy world with the real world of social actuality. Refn does not deploy this binary on a separate axis but blends them together so they are essentially indistinguishable from each other. The first shots of the film raise questions about whether something really happened to a teen girl or if the captured image of her is part of a photographic illusion? The film's intermezzo that bridges the two realms occurs in the elaborate fashion show where a physically transformed Jesse walks down the darkly lit runway, enrapturing the audience into a futuristic dream world. Jesse is seemingly alone amidst the big triangles and inverted triangles (neon blue). These are abstract spaces that suggest an alternative domain removed from reality. Yet in Jesse's return to the real world, the sequence proves pivotal in her maturity and development as a model. Because so much of modeling is about the participants putting on a costume façade for the fashion shows, Refn chose to make The Neon Demon with primarily inorganic and synthetic ingredients in mind. For instance, Cliff Martinez composed a wholly electronic score that punctuates the film's dreamy and airy qualities. Martinez's cues contain many mini-ostinatos with various melodies and dissonant phrases repeated over and over again. With the amplified beats added, they practically carry the power to hypnotize the audience into a trance as it also becomes mesmerized with Refn's images.

An uber-stylish horror film, The Neon Demon is deserving of multiple nominations during awards season (cinematography, art direction, and costume design, at the very least). Broad Green Pictures delivers a sparkling transfer that can justifiably be called reference quality. The uncompressed sound track is also not a letdown. With two brief featurettes, the disc is a bit light on extras but compensates with an anecdote filled commentary track with director and star. VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

[CSW] -1.2- The cinematography, art direction, and costume design, are all outstanding but can't compensate for an almost nonexistent plot and no real character development. Painfully slow (every shot drags on and on) and poorly written, this movie screams "I am an art film" but has little to offer in way of a story or interesting dialogue. It feels like it's never going to end. Very beautiful women do a lot of walking around and staring at themselves in mirrors for far too long. Make-up gets applied (slowly). Elle Fanning is told she's naturally beautiful multiple times. Models cry and give each other dirty looks. Then there's a lot of blood and some gross scenes. But honestly by that time I was numb from how boring this film was so I didn't care. Although seductively stylish the noted director can't quite compensate for an underdeveloped plot and thinly written characters.
[V5.0-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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