Review: The Neon Demon
The Neon Demon begins with an arresting tableau of a young woman, innocence nevertheless radiating through the semi-geisha and glitter makeup, garbed in blood and couture. She makes for a most beautiful corpse except, as the retreating camera slowly reveals, she is alive though her wellness is threatened at every turn in the strange and disturbing horror fairy tale that marks the latest offering from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn.
Refn, or NWR as he has billed himself in the opening titles of his latest film, is not one for restraint nor is he, as he has displayed with each passing film, particularly tethered to narrative or performance, at least not in their conventional forms. It's not that he champions style over substance - for him, the image is the narrative and performance part of the stringently composed mise-en-scène. So perhaps it's not altogether surprising that, after the noirish romanticism of Drive and the pulpy luridness of Only God Forgives, Refn should alight upon a milieu where, to paraphrase one character, "Image isn't everything, it's the only thing."
The gaze and the object reflected and consumed by that gaze thorn through the film. Jesse (Elle Fanning), the young woman featured in the opening image, is one of the hundreds of small town girls pursuing their dreams in Los Angeles. Sixteen but billing herself as nineteen on the advice of her agent (Christina Hendricks), Jesse appears a lamb lost in the woods where predatory mannequins like Sarah (Abbey Lee) and Gigi (Bella Heathcote) roam. The phrase "bionic woman" is broached at one point in the film and Sarah and Gigi embody a robotic perfection that is achieved by a surgeon's knife or Photoshop. In a world where youth is already in decay once the bloom begins, it's no small wonder that Sarah and Gigi (who has undergone practically every conceivable form of cosmetic surgery) vibrate with hostility at Jesse, whose unmanufactured beauty and security in her looks, threaten their value.
If the women that surround Jesse resemble predatory insects plotting their kill or vampires craving to feast on her ripe flesh, the men are no less bloodthirsty, ready to ravage Jesse with their cameras or their bodies. Dean (Karl Glusman), the aspiring photographer who may love Jesse in addition to viewing her as an entry into the fashion world, and Jack (Desmond Harrington), the renowned photographer who tells her to take off her clothes and anoints her with smearings of liquid gold, are mirror images of one another - both cadaverous in appearance, both hovering over her like Nosferatus. Hank, the seedy owner (played with tremendous effectiveness by Keanu Reeves) of the even seedier motel in which Jesse resides, has no compunction about pimping or raping the young girls who know better than to stay at his motel but have no other choice. In one unsettling sequence, he slips into Jesse's room, stands before her sleeping figure, inserts his knife down her throat as she awakens in fright, and whispers at her to open wider. It turns out to be a dream, but the ensuing reality is no less frightening as Jesse presses her ear against the wall to hear the muffled screams of the thirteen-year-old next door as Hank claims his next victim.
Refn has always been a superb visualist and The Neon Demon finds him taking aesthetic inspiration from the likes of Helmut Newton, whose photographs are postcards of hardboiled glamour in which models seem vampiric or perplexingly corpse-like; the seductive doom of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (which, along with Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, could be seen as a not-so-distant companion piece to The Neon Demon); and the Italian giallo films which revelled in its combination of horror and eroticism. The giallo influence can also be heard in Cliff Martinez's stabbing synths and prickly tinkles. Cinematographer Natasha Braier coats the images with a gloss that feels like embalming fluid; the camera doesn't so much observe as probe, pierce, and dissect. Reality and illusion are intertwined - images are reflected, mirrored, and surfaced. Erin Benach's costumes range from the diaphanous off-duty ensembles that speak to Jesse's nebulous and unformed figure to the almost animalistic carapaces worn by Sarah, Gigi, and Ruby (the brilliant Jena Malone), the makeup artist who may or may not be Jesse's guardian angel.
Refn does not skimp on the chic choc - necrophilia, cannibalism, and other forms of sexualised horror are present and accounted for - and he maintains a painfully powerful sense of hallucinatory dread throughout the film. For all the carnivores that surround her, it is Jesse who is the most dangerous animal. She may appear angelic, she may even be pure, but she is also aware of how to get ahead in this particular world. "I'm not as helpless as I look," she tells Ruby at one point. She's aware of her power and it's in the dawning acknowledgement of that power - the sly smiles after scoring each success - that ultimately leads to her downfall.
The Neon Demon
Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn
Written by: Mary Laws, Nicolas Winding Refn, Polly Stenham Starring: Elle Fanning, Karl Glusman, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, Christina Hendricks, Keanu Reeves, Desmond Harrington, Alessandro Nivola, Charles Baker, Jamie Clayton
