A young girl with big dreams moves to Los Angeles only to be corrupted and consumed by the evil that lurks therein. It’s a tale as old as…well, Hollywood, but it’s never been told with such brutal beauty as in Nicholas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon.
Elle Fanning stars as Jesse, an innocent young beauty from a small town who moves to Los Angeles to start a career in modelling. We first meet her lounging on a couch covered in blood, posing for a photographer (Karl Glusman) who she met on the internet. Yes, Jesse is that naive, but despite breaking Amateur Model Rule #1, Jesse gets lucky with the photographer, who happens to be just another lonely soul trying to make his way in the city. He even gives her a ride back to her seedy motel where the manager (Keanu Reeves) advertises the lost young girls holed up in his rooms as if they were his possessions.
Yes, this ain’t the kind of town for a girl like Jesse. Yet she presses on, and soon, with some help from a brutally honest casting agent (Christina Hendricks) and a seductive makeup artist (Jena Malone in the stand out performance of the film) she is hobnobbing with the top talent in the city, catching the eye of a big name photographer (Desmond Harrington) and a sleazy fashion designer (Alessandro Nivola). She’s also catching some piercing stares from a pair of older models Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee), who resent her natural beauty. All of these characters make clear that Jesse’s beauty is a thing of danger and power, a fact Jesse soon seizes on herself, shedding her wide-eyed innocence for a visage of cold calculation.
It’s a transformation that seems all but inevitable in Winding Refn’s stunningly constructed neon wonderland. There is no room for naturalism here, everything is staged just so. Beauty and design have always been the first priority of his films, but The Neon Demon is his most striking and seamless creation yet. Each scene is so carefully crafted by production designer Elliott Hostetter and so beautifully captured by cinematographer Natasha Braier that the story could be about drywall installation and you’d watch with captive amazement. Even when Refn delves into the realm of painfully overt symbolism, it’s so well shot that it hardly bothers you. He’s further helped by Cliff Martinez’s gripping and spine-tingling score, which may promise more scares than the film actually delivers, but keeps you on edge nevertheless.
And that’s the rub, really. Like Drive and Only God Forgives, The Neon Demon feels like it’s one or two changes away from being a fantastic film. It’s an absolute pleasure to watch, and does feature some wickedly twisted moments in the last half hour (a necrophiliac lesbian scene will have you squirming in your seat), but it feels like it doesn’t deliver on its promise. In Drive we waited all movie for an amazing car chase that didn’t happen. In Only God Forgives the much hyped final showdown was hardly a tussle. With The Neon Demon, Jesse’s final reckoning is glossed over so that we can get to a final scene of grating symbolism that’s five minutes too long. Some films are deliberately paced, Refn’s films feel debilitatingly paced. This is especially noticeable in moments of quiet dialogue, in which characters speak like aliens trying to convince each other that they’re humans.
But hey, at least he’s consistent. The Neon Demon is Nicholas Winding Refn’s best film, and horror fans with patience and an appreciation for beautiful production design will be enthralled. Those looking for character growth that goes beyond a change of makeup, or a story that says something deeper than “vanity corrupts” may want to look elsewhere. While The Neon Demon is as carefully crafted as a fashion photo shoot, its got all the story-telling depth of a perfume ad.
Reviewed by Evan Arppe.
