Review: Nicolas Winding Refn’s THE NEON DEMON

Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest is a singular masterpiece.

At the press conference for THE NEON DEMON in Cannes earlier this year, co-writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn attributed his latest film to that of punk rock.

And he was right.

Not in the literal sense. No one in the film has a mohawk and you won’t find a Sex Pistols song in sight. But THE NEON DEMON does more to shake up the cinematic status quo than any other film of its budget or profile in recent memory. Refn’s last movie, the opulent and divisive ONLY GOD FORGIVES attempted to do this too, but considering it served as yet another showcase for actor Ryan Gosling, it was too attached to Refn’s breakthrough film DRIVE and too chained to expectations to truly stand on its own and cause the kind of serious damage it should have.

THE NEON DEMON, however, is a contemporary cinematic anomaly; a lethal, dangerous animal. Like the mountain lion that inexplicably invades actress Elle Fanning’s festering LA motel room after hours, it’s an intrusive, magnificent and organic threat, whose majesty momentarily traps you, locks your eyes and stops rational thought, giving the movie just enough time to sneak in and metaphorically tear your throat out.

If it sounds like I’m drifting into hyperbole here, you aint read nothing yet.

Because this critic worshiped every inch of THE NEON DEMON. Even the stretches that tried my patience. And be warned, with its glacial pace and refusal to behave like a “normal” movie, it will at times test your faith as well. But that’s the point of the exercise. Here, Refn once more (and perhaps more than in any of his previous works) revels in his obsessions, slowing down time and space to a crawl until the viewer becomes trapped in a waking dream.

Some have accused the picture of being an empty vessel, a shimmering slab of moving eye candy that prefers style over substance.

Well, like The Lovin’ Spoonful once sang, trying to convince those that dismiss the film otherwise, is a lot like “trying to tell a stranger about rock ‘n’ roll”.

They’ll never get it.

And again, that’s the point.

To draw a long, bloody line in the stained sand.

The style becomes the substance.

THE NEON DEMON does indeed star Elle Fanning as Jesse, a 16 year old girl who appears in LA (I say appears because the film simply starts and she’s there, like a dream, no exposition necessary or wanted) and is almost immediately sucked into the cesspool she has willingly sought out: the ruthless, alien world of professional modelling. Jesse is like Dorothy over the rainbow in Oz, an innocent lost in an ocean of sex and ego and illusion and, like Dorothy, she begins to assemble admirers and enablers as she drifts down her own yellow brick road to hell. First there’s the sweet amateur photographer (Karl Glusman) who loves her and anchors her in reality; then there’s the supportive make-up artist (Jenna Malone) whose attentions might be more sapphic and not as sisterly as they seem; there’s the malevolent motel manager (Keanu Reeves) who leers and stalks the peripherals of the story and the monstrous designer (Alessandro Nivola) who places Jesse on a pedestal. And then there are the statuesque models who are none to pleased to be replaced by this doe-eyed ingenue.

And then there’s that not-so-cowardly lion…

And Oz himself, who is of course Refn, the architect and the man behind the curtain, drawing all these characters and their energies toward him, moving them around his intricately designed fever dream like living props, creating a lush artifice that mirrors the manufactured world these players have chosen to live out their empty dreams in. Using color, glitter, long takes, slow pans, slow-motion, sensory-smacking optical tricks and minimal use of dialogue and gelling it all together with Cliff Martinez’s pulsing electronic score, the director creates a mesmerizing, measured cinematic swoon.

And then he punishes us.

Hard.

Revealing how he does this would destroy the magic trick.

But telling you why he does this is essential to understanding his mind.

He does it to harm. He denies you the things you want from a movie. He pins you down. You start to like it. Then he hurts you.

Then he leaves you. Literally, in the desert.

Refn is a fetish filmmaker, by his own admission (see his magnificent dissertation on the back end of Blue Underground’s recent SNUFF Blu-ray release for a master class on just what exactly a fetish filmmaker is) and much of his cinematic sensibilities are informed by European and American exploitation films. And on that tip, the skin of THE NEON DEMON reminded me of a vintage Jess Franco/Harry Alan Towers sex and murder epic. Like VENUS IN FURS. Or NECRONOMICON. Films whose better-than-he-was-used-to budgets, allowed Franco to take his own filthy obsessions and inflate them to operatic proportions, mixing art with gutter trash until the lines between both were blurred and meaningless.

There are people that will hate THE NEON DEMON.

Fuck them.

It’s a singular masterpiece.

And the most accomplished and transgressive Nicolas Winding Refn movie to date.