★

★

★

½

☆





Nicolas Winding Refn accidentally completes Joseph Kosinski’s “Beautifully empty” trilogy (see TRON: Legacy and Oblivion) with this savagely gorgeous and astutely aimless…horror? Drama? Satire? The Neon Demon could be easily labelled as all three, or neither. Elle Fanning stars as Jesse, a shy adolescent model who arrives in L.A. with hopes of making it big in an industry renowned for mercilessly chewing up and spitting out thousands like her. In the words of Perturbator, “She is young, she is beautiful, she is next”. But there’s something different about Jesse: unlike her peers, she requires no plastic surgery or even makeup to achieve the effortless impeccability they strive so desperately for. Alessandro Nivola’s fashion designer describes her as “a diamond in a sea of glass” in the presence of jealous rivals Gigi and Sarah.





His compliment can also be applied to the film itself, but for a whole different reason: unlike the natural phenomenon of a precious gemstone to which Jesse’s beauty is compared, it has been expertly manufactured and precision-tooled to a mirror shine. While the vapid characters and empty script seem a natural extension of the world they occupy, the superior sound and vision are a wondrously artificial veneer. The respective scores to Blade Runner and Under the Skin have had a one night stand after watching The Guest, giving birth to Cliff Martinez’masterful soundscape. Rivers of warbling synths are interspersed with spine-tingling electronic shivers, complimented exquisitely by Natasha Braier’s cinematography. Every frame carries the colour and geometry of a Chvrches album cover dipped in fresh blood, with bursts of lens flare-borne prisms to make J.J. Abrams soil himself.





In this respect, and in the bitter, sniping dialogue of her would-be cohorts, the film echoes the vain fetishizing of Jesse’s presence, revelling in the superficial desire for visual perfection. Fanning gives Jesse just the right level of shoe-gazing timidity for every moment she’s not in the spotlight, before her posture suddenly unfurls, her eyes and mouth sharpening as the camera flashes begin to bounce off her damask skin.





Jena Malone is skin-strippingly malevolent as Jesse’s makeup artist, Ruby, and Abbey Lee as Sarah acts everyone off the screen with her eyes alone in one of the films tensest moments: while Jesse is the centrepiece of the scene (rehearsing a catwalk for the designers), Sarah's defeat is depicted only by the echoing gunshot of high heels and the acid tears in her eyes.





“Why have sour milk when you can have fresh meat?” she asks. Though many have already noted a lack of actual meat to feast on here, it’s not the insufficient, nay, non-existent substance that pulls the film below sublime, but the pacing: like a fashion student who hands in their superbly-mounted portfolio a week late, there’s no sense of urgency to be found until the jaw-dropping, stomach-curdling dénouement; a sequence which is just about as unwarrantedly enjoyable as guilty pleasures can get.





Perhaps I’ve been too fully indoctrinated by Hollywood editing that caters to attention deficiency, but I found great swathes of The Neon Demon (as I did with Refn’s Drive and Only God Forgives) tortuously slow and almost reliably uninvolving. Regardless of the many pulled punches and unusually justified superficiality, the director’s trademark distance remains: you can look, but you can’t touch.