Nicolas Winding Refn has spent his career building beautiful traps, and The Neon Demon is the most beautiful and the most trapped of them all. Elle Fanning plays Jesse, a 16-year-old who moves from a small unnamed town in Georgia to Los Angeles after her parents die, and the film follows what the fashion industry does to her. It is a horror movie about looking. It is also, at 118 minutes, a movie that never quite decides what it wants to say about looking.
Trailer, via Prime Movies.
Elle Fanning and the Georgia Runaway
The setup is clean and mean. Jesse has no parents, no money and no plan beyond being seen. Fanning plays her with a stillness that reads as either vacancy or armor, and Refn shoots her the way the other characters see her: as a surface. That is the point, and it is also the problem. A movie about a girl with no interior has to supply one from somewhere, and Refn supplies mood instead.
She meets Dean, a photographer played by Karl Glusman, who shoots her first. She meets Ruby, a makeup artist played by Jena Malone, who brings her into a circle of older models: Gigi, played by Bella Heathcote, and Sarah, played by Abbey Lee. Gigi and Sarah ask Jesse about her sexual history. Jesse lies and says she has one. That small lie is one of the few moments where Jesse does something instead of having something done to her.
Roberta Hoffmann, Jack McCarther and the Machine
Christina Hendricks plays Roberta Hoffmann, who runs the modeling agency that signs Jesse. Roberta tells her to say she is nineteen. She sends Jesse to a test shoot with Jack McCarther, played by Desmond Harrington. McCarther has Jesse strip and rubs gold paint onto her body, and the shoot works. This is the industry as a processing plant: you go in as a person and come out as a product, and the film is honest that the product is better.
The gold paint sequence is the first time The Neon Demon looks like it means what it says. It is also the last time the movie has a clean idea. From there the film stacks images — triangles, mirrors, reflections of Jesse multiplied — without ever telling us what they add up to. The film drew particular praise for its cinematography, and that praise is earned. The screenplay, co-written by Refn with Mary Laws and Polly Stenham, is where the thing falls down.
Robert Sarno’s Casting Call
At a casting call for the designer Robert Sarno, played by Alessandro Nivola, Sarah is in the room too. Sarno ignores Sarah. He is entranced by Jesse. Sarah, distraught, asks Jesse how it feels to be the one everyone admires. Jesse answers: “it’s everything.” Sarah lunges at her. Jesse pulls away and cuts her hand on a shard of glass. Sarah sucks the blood from the wound.
That is the best scene in the film, and it works because it is simple. Envy has a body and a mouth, and the movie stops pretending otherwise. Jesse goes back to her motel and faints, and the film dissolves into abstract imagery. The abstraction is not a payoff. It is an exit.
Keanu Reeves as Hank and the Cougar
Keanu Reeves plays Hank, the motel owner, and he is the only person in the movie who says what he wants out loud. A cougar gets into Jesse’s room through the open balcony door and wrecks it. Hank makes Jesse pay for the damage. Dean covers it. The cougar is not subtle and neither is Hank, and the film is better whenever it stops being subtle. Refn’s worst habit is the belief that a held shot of a blank face is a thought.
Reeves gets the film’s only real comedy, and he gets it by playing Hank as a man with no shame and no mystery. The rest of the cast is stranded. Malone has the most to do as Ruby and does it well, which is why her performance drew praise even from people who disliked the movie. Fanning is asked to be a screen rather than a person, and she is a good screen. That is not the same as a performance.
The Neon Demon’s Fashion Show and the Blood
Sarno’s fashion show is the film’s centerpiece. Gigi talks to Jesse about cosmetic surgery. Jesse closes the show and hallucinates triangular shapes and reflections of herself. Afterward she goes to a bar with Dean, and Sarno pulls Dean into a conversation. The film keeps circling the same idea: beauty is a resource, and the people who have it are eaten by the people who want it.
The tagline is “Beauty is vicious.” It is an accurate tagline and a thin thesis. The Neon Demon has one idea and 118 minutes, and it spends most of them restating the idea in prettier light. The graphic content drew criticism, and the criticism is fair in the sense that the violence is not doing argumentative work. It is doing decorative work. A film can be about consumption and still end up consuming its own cast, and this one does.
What Cannes and the Box Office Actually Showed
The Neon Demon is an international co-production between France, Denmark and the United States. It competed for the Palme d’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. That was the third consecutive Refn film to do so, after Drive in 2011 and Only God Forgives in 2013. Amazon Studios and Broad Green Pictures released it in the United States on June 24, 2016. It grossed $3.6 million against a $7.5 million production budget.
That gap is the story the film’s defenders have to answer for, and it is not a moral failing. It is a fact about who this movie was for. The Neon Demon was made for a festival audience and a cult audience, and it found the second one. Reviews were polarized. Refn’s direction drew praise, as did Malone and Fanning, as did the score, as did the cinematography. The screenplay and the graphic content drew criticism. That split is not a failure of critical nerve. It is an accurate description of an uneven film.
Where The Neon Demon Ranks Against Refn’s Other Work
Here is how the pieces of this film sort out, best to worst:
- The cinematography — the reason to watch it at all.
- Malone as Ruby — the only performance with a full arc.
- The casting-call scene — the film’s one clean idea, executed.
- Reeves as Hank — a jolt of ugly fun in a movie that is otherwise humorless.
- Fanning as Jesse — a good surface, and nothing the script lets her do with it.
- The score — effective, and asked to carry scenes that have no other content.
- The screenplay — three credited writers and no single point of view.
- The abstract imagery — a substitute for a third act.
That ranking is the review. The Neon Demon is a mood in search of a movie, and the mood is genuinely strong. The camera turns Los Angeles into a lit display case, and the film’s best stretches are the ones where nothing happens and it just looks. The trouble is that Refn has made this film before, twice, and both times he had a character who wanted something specific. Drive had a driver. Only God Forgives had a man and a debt. The Neon Demon has a 16-year-old who says being admired is “everything,” and the film agrees with her so completely that it never pushes back.
The fashion industry material is not satire. It is set dressing. Roberta Hoffmann telling Jesse to claim she is nineteen is a real detail and a good one, and the film drops it. The cougar is a real detail and the film drops it. The gold paint is a real image and the film never returns to it. Refn keeps throwing out the specific in favor of the general, and the general is always a woman staring into a mirror.
What is worth keeping is Malone. Ruby is the one character who moves through the world with intent, and Malone plays her need as something active rather than decorative. When the film finally gives her something to do, it lands harder than anything around it, because for once the movie has a person instead of a symbol. Fanning is not the problem. Jesse is written as a blank so the audience can project onto her, and Fanning fills the blank with watchfulness. But watchfulness is not a want.
The Neon Demon is not a disaster. It is a beautiful, expensive, well-acted shrug. It competed at Cannes on the strength of Refn’s name and it earned $3.6 million against a $7.5 million budget, and both of those facts make sense together. This is a film for the people who already agreed with it before it started. Everyone else gets two hours of gorgeous light and a thesis they already knew.
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