Movie Review: 'The Neon Demon'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- For viewers who appreciated Drive, the 2011 action thriller starring Ryan Gosling, the film stirred up plenty of interest in Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn.
On the other hand, that feeling wasn't shared by those of us who found it a high-octane-but-low-impact, gore-obsessed disappointment with threadbare characters.
In his latest, The Neon Demon, Refn (Bronson, Only God Forgives) tries his hand at the horror-thriller genre.
Elle Fanning stars as 16-year-old Jesse, a small-town orphan and aspiring model who moves to Los Angeles, where she goes to work for a modeling agency headed by Christina Hendricks, who tells her that she has that indefinable star quality that everybody wants but few have, that the regular resident photographers will be fascinated by, and that the other femme-fatale models will immediately be jealous of.
Jesse takes up residence in a seedy motel managed by the lecherous and treacherous Hank (Keanu Reeves).
As for the other beauty-obsessed models at her agency -- including Ruby (Jena Malone), Gigi (Bella Heathcote), and Sarah (Abbey Lee) -- because they would do anything to possess the passive-aggressive vulnerability/power that comes to Jesse naturally, they begin to chip away at her youth, innocence, and vitality as if to siphon it off to themselves.
But Jesse's apparent naivete doesn't linger.
Refn indulges his penchant for gore once again and – also once again – offers one-dimensional characters as part of an exercise in empty surrealistic style.
Oh, the film is visually slick, but its oblique, vacant narrative doesn't really add up, the pacing is on the ponderous side, and the intended critique of the cutthroat modeling world that predominates in the film's first half is so slight and half-hearted, it hardly registers – why, even the Zoolander comedies are more pointed – this even though the film's message, such as it is, is spelled out in neon.
But much of the violence that occurs late in the game seems designed for shock value rather than narrative cohesion, and the ending is unintentionally funny and off-puttingly campy.
Director Refn – whose on-screen credit is now apparently NWR -- co-wrote the bizarre and virtually plotless screenplay about the dangers of beauty with Mary Laws and Polly Stenham.
It's a frequently cruel script that could easily be accused of not just the objectification of women but extreme misogyny. And that much of it is conveyed via dream sequences and/or through the point-of-view of women doesn't amount to much in the way of a defense.
But, then, Refn usually traffics in shiny but empty surfaces that don't stay with you or seem worth exploring, and this film is an annoying case in point.
So we'll model 2 stars out of 4 for the abstract and eccentric high-fashion horror shocker, The Neon Demon. It's not just about sleaze. It is sleaze.
