THE NEON DEMON (Nicolas Winding Refn). 117 minutes. Opens Friday (June 24). See listing. Rating: NN
The Neon Demon is more fetish object than motion picture. Director/co-writer Nicolas Winding Refn has crafted a long, lurid tale of L.A. culture eating its young in slick, overheated early 80s synthesizers and scarlets.
Elle Fanning is eminently watchable as a teenage ingenue at risk of being swallowed whole by the modelling industry, but Winding Refn only seems interested in her performance as it relates to his lighting schemes.
It’s a film madly in love with its reference points – think Michael Mann, Tony Scott, Brian De Palma and maybe Paul Schrader – but with no ideas of its own. The rivalry between Fanning’s naïf and the more seasoned models played by Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee smacks of All About Eve or Showgirls, but nothing ever comes of it. And once Winding Refn reveals his endgame, we understand that nothing could.
This isn’t that kind of movie much like 2013’s Only God Forgives, it’s really just a glossy reworking of some very low-rent ideas, and the gloss isn’t enough to fool us. Bit players Keanu Reeves and Desmond Harrington have some fun as the alpha-male douche-bags who think they run things, but Winding Refn doesn’t care about them either.
