The Neon Demon (2016)'s comments - page 2

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Siskoid

Nicolas Winding Refn gives The Neon Demon a striking visual look, as if the story had been created out of fashion spreads and glitter glue, and as a visual experience, it's a triumph. What's more difficult to accept, initially, is the cold, apathetic acting, but I think that's part of the same aesthetic - vacuous beauty looking at you with dead eyes, and a conflation of "deadness" and "beauty" and the underlying ambitions. Elle Fanning plays an innocent, new to the fashion world of Los Angeles, someone whose beauty fascinates (or so the film tells us, this is a difficult thing to make EVERYONE in the audience believe no matter who you cast), but which takes its toll. Beauty has its price, as does the pursuit of any marketable "talent", so everyone wants something from. Weird things start to happen that play better on a metaphorical level, but I especially like the abstract "neon demon" itself, like a glowing symbol of Elle's Jesse engaging with her own ambition and potentially losing her soul. This is a more interesting angle than what the climax provides, sending us left when we should have gone right, and though the resolution is strange, it feels ordinary in the context of what has become a horror film by that point. The casting of such actors as Christina Hendricks and Keanu Reeves - older symbols of beauty, I guess - in smaller roles only makes me want to see more of them, as well. So though emptiness and superficiality are definitely themes, it does leave me with a hollow feeling.

4 years 7 months ago