The Neon Demon

Elle Fanning in The Neon Demon

I enjoy being a contrarian, but Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon is as bad as advertised; an complete waste of celluloid. Refn's previous film, Only God Forgives, was also a failure, but, at least, had some semblance of an artist's quest in it: that of dismantling the heroic mythology Refn had built around Ryan Gosling in Drive. Here, for the first time, a Refn film has a female protagonist and he is utterly at sea. He is unable to get a convincing or interesting performance out of his mostly female cast. Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee are predictably awful, but when talents like Elle Fanning and Jena Malone don't register, you know the hand on the wheel is shaky. 

The Neon Demon looks nice. The make-up, costumes, and décor are all arresting, but the story is total hooey. Fanning is a homeless waif who comes to LA to seek her fortune. She is an instant success as a model, but all that glitters is not gold, there is more to the picture than meets the eye, and there is no place like home. By picture's end, she is lying at the bottom of a pool and is down for the count. Part of the problem is that Refn takes his horror tropes too literally. When Fanning's fake fashion friends turn on her, their vampirism seems silly, not scary. Compare what Lynch, in Mulholland Drive and Cronenberg, in Maps to the Stars, did with this premise and you can see how short Refn has fallen. (10/28/16)