The Neon Demon review: 'a wonderfully stylish and stylised movie'

Elle Fanning in ‘The Neon Demon’ (Co (Courtesy Everett Collection/Rex/Shutterstock)

Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn, 117 mins, starring: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks, Abbey Lee, Bella Heathcote

The Neon Demon is a wonderfully stylish and stylised movie, an exercise in narcissism and grotesquerie in which director Nicolas Winding Refn takes a morbid pleasure in showing young and glamorous people behaving in a very ugly and self-obsessed fashion. It is pitched somewhere between a satire and a horror picture, between a Russ Meyer exploitation pic and a very earnest art movie.

The film offers a similar story to that told in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and David Cronenberg’s Maps To The Stars. This is a cautionary tale about a young woman from out of town, drawn to the bright lights of Los Angeles. Jesse (Elle Fanning) is sweet natured and seemingly naive but she is on the make. Barely turned 16 but told to pretend she is is 19, the young model has “that look”, the “thing” that enraptures photographers and fashion designers. She doesn’t have any other real talents but knows that she can make money out of her looks. Beauty is her currency.

One of the film’s pleasures is the way it distorts and defamiliarises LA settings we have seen countless times before – seedy motels, Hollywood mansions with empty swimming pools, agents’ offices, photography studios and warehouses. The eeriness is accentuated by the hypnotic electronic score from composer Cliff Martinez.

Like his fellow Dane Lars Von Trier, Refn is prepared to push ideas to extremes and to challenge conventional notions about genre, characterisation and good taste. At times, he seems as obsessed with surface beauty as his protagonists. Even a simple sequence showing Jesse meeting a photographer friend on the streets is shot at “magic hour”, so we can get the full impact of an orange hued Californian dusk. Refn begins with a Dario Argento-style shot of a model on a chaise longue, made up to look as if she has just had her throat cut. When the blood begins to spill for real, the director is very artful (and very arch) in the way he shows it being shed.

The deadpan, affectless performances are combined with strange surrealistic flourishes. An eyeball features as prominently here as it did in Un Chien Andalou, there is a truly bizarre scene of a cougar running amok in a motel room and the lines between dream and reality are continually blurred.

With their slender frames and high cheek bones, the models Sarah and Gigi (Lee and Heathcote) look ethereal, even angelic. Their conversation, though, is very base - about sex, plastic surgery and money. They’re like vampires, preying on Jesse.

With a little tweaking, The Neon Demon could easily have been played as a comedy. Its screenplay (co-written by Refn with Mary Laws and Polly Stenham) has plenty of witty one-liners. Jesse’s rival models are very young but just not young enough. “Once you hit 21, you’re irrelevant,” one character observes forlornly. Keanu Reeves, once a Hollywood pin-up, is a grizzled and bad tempered motel manager. There is something comical as well as sinister about Jena Malone’s character, a make-up artist who works in a mortuary and makes a blundering attempt to seduce Jesse. The more solemn the film becomes and the more operatic its violence, the more obvious it is that the storytelling is partly tongue in cheek. Refn, who once directed Geraldine McEwan in a Miss Marple drama for British TV, has a very well developed sense of irony.

This isn’t just pastiche David Lynch or yet another caustic yarn about pampered Californian types behaving badly. What makes it so distinctive and so jarring is the way it continually shifts tone and perspective. It is elegant and juvenile, shocking and satirical by turns.