If you haven't seen or appreciated Nicolas Winding Refn's other films (Drive, Only God Forgives, Valhalla Rising), don't even go near this one. It's typical of his work, and also a more visceral experience; I've said often before that Refn's films are examples of film as an experience. As we expect from him, The Neon Demon has little real plot, ill-defined characters, and a lack of anything you would want from a summer blockbuster.
What we have instead is a film with little dialogue (which is often pulpy and thin, if not a little forced) but so much style it almost hurts to watch. We are absorbed into the chaotic melodrama of Jesse, a young aspiring model who yearns for success and fame, and her world of superficial camaraderie and cutthroat competition. In many ways, this is an even more surrealist Black Swan, substituting the dancers of the latter with models and photographers. As Jesse (Elle Fanning) climbs the ladder, she sidesteps and flatters her superiors until, eventually, she overcomes them and turns into a goddess of her own world. Her success, of course, provokes attack from the natural world, her community, and even her colleagues.
And as the film turns to its inevitable conclusion, Refn does something very sly: Whereas the beginning of the film featured more abstract images and dynamic visual spectacle, the climax (traditionally shown through more kinetic cinematography) is where Refn stills his eye, allowing the audience to ground ourselves in very real, graphic immediacy. Of course, the actual images he's filming are still surreal, which makes our experience of the end that much more bewildering and infuriating. In a good way.
It's a seductive story of hunger. We might ordinarily call it a "coming of age" plotline, but here we follow a young girl who is more vain than she pretends and who deludes herself into thinking she has more control of her destiny than she really does. She absorbs praise, and we see her blossom from a weak little flower to a champion and predator. Her little compromises build up into bridges she subsequently burns. By the end of her dark and distinctly unromantic narrative, rather than Jesse achieving her dreams, we see those dreams literally come to consume her. We see her colleagues, cougars and wolves, no less voracious in their own right, ever circling and longing to partake of her success and her flesh. As the dream sequences meld with the action sequences, we are held captive in a nightmarish netherworld of strobe lights and vibrant colors that sometimes look like a Kubrick or Lynch film and sometimes look like Tron. But there is nothing silly about the film, and its final scene packs a powerful punch.
IMDb: The Neon Demon
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