Movie Review: The Neon Demon

The modelling world becomes a literal meat market in Nicolas Winding Refn’s eye-popping, gut-churning horror flick The Neon Demon – and no, those are not superlatives.

Jesse (Elle Fanning) has come to L.A. with big eyes and bigger dreams of becoming a star. Fanning herself has already achieved this, of course, thanks to an astonishing run throughout her teenage years; an era of innocence that comes to an abrupt end thanks to Refn’s bloodlust.

Her character is wholesome but not naïve; as Jesse tells mother hen makeup artist Ruby (Jena Malone) and jealous catwalk models Sarah (Abbey Lee) and Gigi (Bella Heathcote), she is aware of her appearance, and the effect it has on people. She’s sorry not sorry about it.

Her beguiling beauty and transfixing gaze is both a weapon and a target. Just 16 years of age – she’s told to say “19” – Jesse is quickly catapulted up the ranks, past Sarah and Gigi, by the shallow gatekeepers of her industry. Her looks are also what make her the object of her skeezy motel manager’s unwanted affections (played by a grotesque Keanu Reeves), as well as the prey of another, less expected predator.

But her enemies eventually come to the same conclusion of her admirers; their contempt for Jesse turning into an insatiable desire for her alabaster skin. With numbing patience and a hypnotic electro score by Cliff Martinez, Refn builds to a gory finale. Though the descent into hardcore horror is telegraphed from the film’s first moments, it still packs a mighty wallop. Good luck forgetting those final scenes next time you’re scrolling through #inspo on Instagram.

Early in The Neon Demon, writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn has a modelling agent played by Christina Hendricks paraphrase a classic sports quote: “Beauty isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”

Refn seems like a self-aware guy at the best of times, but now, he’s straight-up trolling us.

Following the complete and utter rejection of his static, strobe-lit revenge picture Only God Forgives by viewers and reviewers alike, the filmmaker doubles down on his alienating aesthetic (with help from cinematographer Natasha Braier); this time, however, he answers his critics by specifically making a movie about an obsessive pursuit of superficial perfection – a pursuit conducted by his characters, and by him.

Refn seems to argue that he’s not the only one who aestheticises and fetishises violence (a complaint levelled against him since Pusher, all the way to Drive). Jesse and her colleagues are draped in fake blood, wartime regalia and leather, with the camera perpetually trained on them, and them perpetually trained on the camera. Is it a shocking, particularly thoughtful observation? Not really. Does it give him the ideal backdrop to work out his cinematic fixations? Most certainly.

Midway through the feature, Jesse walks down a catwalk and even comes face to face with a demonic-seeming lens – emerging from the other side entirely changed, like Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive (another film about a trip to Los Angeles turned hellish). Or, given the leather pants Jesse dons in the next scene, maybe the better comparison would be Sandy at the end of Grease.

The Neon Demon is catnip for fans of Dario Argento’s nausea-inducing phantasmagorias like Suspiria and Inferno, the body horror of peak Cronenberg and, I suppose, the documentary The September Issue. (Should you find yourself sitting at this highly specific intersection of taste, congrats!)

I’m tempted to say Refn’s latest will infuriate anyone who was alternately bored and repulsed by Only God Forgives (as I was). Nonetheless, I found myself sucked in here with surprising ease.

Chalk it up to the dreamy-eyed and determined lead performance of Elle Fanning, the perfect marriage of subject matter and filmmaker, and the gonzo, dread-inspiring emergence of necrophilia, cannibalism, ritual sacrifice and transmogrification as the film climaxes.

What can I say? The Neon Demon is necrophantastic.

4/5

In cinemas October 20. Rated R18+ for high impact sexual themes.