The Neon Demon Doesn’t Know When to Quit

A review of The Neon Demon, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn

Remember Drive, the stylish 2011 film about a stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) who falls for a woman whose husband is in prison? Driven by a moody electronic score from composer Cliff Martinez, the 2011 film was moving but was also marked by outbursts of violence that weren’t easy to shake.

Refn followed Drive two years later with another project starring Gosling. Provocatively titled Only God Forgives, it again played the Cannes Film Festival, where Refn earlier had won Best Director for Drive. This time around things didn’t go so well for Refn. His sleek, sometimes beautiful imagery in Only God Forgives was overpowered by an ugly revenge story that had little to say about God or forgiveness, and which seemed designed primarily to shock. The film never found an audience.

Refn is back with The Neon Demon, which premiered yet again at Cannes—this time to a strongly split reaction. But unlike Only God Forgives, this story of an aspiring model trying to break into the business won’t soon be forgotten. On one level, it’s clearly a deliberate attempt to shock. Yet amid the beauty and the horror, there may be something of substance the film is trying to convey.

“I can’t sing, I can’t dance, but I’m pretty,” explains the new-to-Los-Angeles Jesse (Elle Fanning). She’s just 16 years old, but her looks cast a spell over men and women alike, whether it’s an agent (Christina Hendricks) who tells her to lie about her age or a photographer (Desmond Harrington) who orders everyone out of a photo shoot so he can be alone with Jesse and slather her in gold paint. The latter sequence is fraught with exploitation and predatory behavior, but as with the posed images of a throat-slit Jesse that open the film, the disturbing visuals hold our gaze—a credit to Natasha Braier’s (The Rover) cinematography as much as to the actors and director.

The film’s personalities are less appealing. Depravity characterizes the world Jesse is looking to conquer, and Refn doesn’t shy away from taking this tale to troubling places inhabited by those who don’t have Jesse’s best interest in mind. In addition to scheming models Gigi and Sarah (Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee), Jesse has to fend off a creepy manager (Keanu Reeves) at the motel where she’s staying, as well as a friend (Jena Malone) who may want more from Jesse than she’s ready—or willing—to give.

As the film grows darker, Refn heightens the film’s dreamlike imagery. But the incidents take on an increasingly nightmarish quality (underscored by an actual dream sequences that includes a very-difficult-to-sit-through shot of a knife blade inserted into Jesse’s mouth, choking her). There’s a same-sex come-on (rejected forcefully) and a bizarre scene of necrophilia, with more intense violence leading to pools of blood and a final twist that is so over the top it breaks any hold the film has achieved. Some will defend the story’s outcome as a natural extension of all that precedes it, but for others, those final minutes will be a deal-breaker.

The Neon Demon has a hypnotic quality to it that is too often undervalued in cinema, and its story shows how easily we can find ourselves in over our heads spiritually, physically and emotionally—especially when questionable decisions lead us to place our trust in individuals who aren’t worthy of it. There’s a timeless quality to such stories, which have been packaged in different guises over the centuries.

But even worthy stories presented in challenging contexts can go too far. When The Neon Demon takes its late, ultra-transgressive turn, it’s not provocative so much as it is head-scratching, even revolting. It’s enough to make you wonder how much Refn cared about the carefully constructed morality tale that leads up to those final few minutes, or if that was all just an excuse to get to the depraved “payoff” the film delivers in its closing moments.