'Neon Demon' a strange, stylish horror film
In Nicolas Winding Refn's strange and stylized horror tale "The Neon Demon," bludgeoning metaphors become even deadlier than the jealous rivalries that ferment inside L.A.'s glam, narcissistic modeling subculture.
No sooner than fresh-faced, Midwestern girl Jesse (Elle Fanning, glowing with salubrious sexuality) instantly lands modeling jobs in the big, bad city, the claws come out.
Literal ones, belonging to the mountain lion that inexplicably winds up in Jesse's cheap and seedy flea-haven motel, run by Keanu Reeves' short-tempered mash-up of Norman Bates and someone from the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" family.
How did the mountain lion get inside her motel room? Why does she return to stay in it after the cat leaves?
Doesn't matter.
Jesse fails to see the cat as dire foreshadowing, a warning that if she stays in this place, something sooner or later will try to eat her alive.
"Neon Demon" opens with an alarmingly beautiful, elegantly lighted and evocatively posed young woman lying dead, her throat slashed, the blood flowing down her arm and dripping into an ever-increasing pool on a white floor.
No, wait. It's just a photo shoot, Jesse's official intro into the figurative cutthroat world of high fashion in the squalid part of the City of the Angels.
This opening lets us know that the rest of "Neon Demon" will be something like Refn's last feature with Ryan Gosling, "Only God Forgives," another visually vibrant, impeccably designed journey into a heart of darkness, with all the blood that comes with it.
A makeup artist named Ruby (Jena Malone) takes a shine to the new girl in town, both professionally and, especially, personally.
"She has that thing," Ruby says about Jesse. Everybody wants something in this place.
Except maybe for Dean (Karl Glusman), a lonely dullard who strikes up a supportive relationship with Jesse and tries to do the right thing by her as she quickly falls into the rabbit hole of self-centered, opportunistic harpies Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee), twin-lookalike blonde models who don't like it one bit when Jesse usurps their status as the "it" girl.
None of these characters possesses depth or any perceivable connections to others. Christina Hendricks' ace modeling agent barely registers a personality beyond professionally polite.
Refn, directing from a screenplay written by him, Mary Laws and Polly Stenham, seems less interested in his characters as people than the figures he maneuvers around a chess board riddled with hack-in-the-box shocks and surprises.
Fanning, the only actor given a character with a crumb of complexity, shifts gears from naive waif to confident woman with a smooth aplomb.
Natasha Braier's fluid cinematography and Elliott Hostetter's sleek production designs conspire with Cliff Martinez's ominously beckoning score to keep us intrigued as Refn's long, long, long fuse pulls us along, eventually delivering a Grand Guignol explosion of nihilism.
Danish filmmaker Refn, who long ago evolved from a cinematic acquired taste to simply an after taste, scored a popular hit with his 2011 crime thriller "Drive," a stylish, modernized remake of the classic western "Shane."
Then his violent 2013 release "Only God Forgives" returned to the dark recesses of the human soul where "The Neon Demon" now dwells.
“The Neon Demon”
★ ★ ½
Starring: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks, Bella Heathcoate
Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn
Other: A Broad Green Pictures release. Rated R for language, nudity, sexual situations, violence. 110 minutes