A dash of Russ Meyer (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), two dashes of David Lynch (Mulholland Drive), three dashes of Dario Argento (Suspiria), and plenty of undiluted Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives): in The Neon Demon, NWR invites his audiences to sleepwalk into a fascinating and repulsive alternate dimension.
It is an age-old story: a sixteen-year-old virgin (an intriguing Elle Fanning) knows how stunningly beautiful she is and moves to Los Angeles to become a model. A whole industry becomes obsessed with her stunning beauty. But the dream can’t last forever. The neon demon, the dictatorship of beauty, is too powerful for that, and vampirism and cannibalism are too rife in the fashion world. NWR creates an extremely stylised, unusual but highly compelling mix of a strange reality, its dark fantasies, ice cold reflections of the ever increasingly narcissism and the cruel truth of fairy tales. One might wonder whether NWR is excessively provocative, but these two hours are brimming with things to see and hear. Devilishly beautiful and depraved.
THE NEON DEMON
DK, FR, US, 2016, dir.: Nicolas Winding Refn, act.: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Keanu Reeves, 117 min.
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