THE NEON DEMON – At its heart lies a classic tale of the unravelling of an ingenue who sides with the corruption around her, but Winding-Refn’s ‘The Neon Demon’ convinces more as an exploitation movie decked out like a perfume ad. It’s about Jesse (played by Elle Fanning), a small-town girl barely out of high school, now in LA with hopes of making it on the catwalk. She meets a trio of fashion victims and begins a descent into a glam world full of all the poisonous peacockery and angst we civilians love to lap up from the safe distance offered by the queue in Primark. But the gist isn’t so much a loss of innocence fable as a darkside revel – Winding Refn wastes no opportunity in bringing on a slew of macabre gewgaws, including occultic ‘Demon Seed’-esque prism imagery, blood baths and randomly errant panthers; even if ‘Neon Demon’ makes as if to critique commodification and objectification, it feels more like a feint that allows Refn to serve up scenes of cannibalism and necrophilia. All this seems more important than the ‘human’ side of the story, and it should be – why tell us what we already know? The culture industry is commonly acknowledged to be a mean and shallow place, at least in films like this. So I’m all for baroque eye candy over heart-on-sleeve, and Winding Refn really does let go with the excess ornamentation, often pretty much stopping the film to say “hey, this looks really cool, no?” before dissolving the image in a plane of diabolically pretty wallpaper, or some slow motion neon pulsation straight out of J’Adore by Argento. This might make ‘Neon Demon’ as spiritually vacant as its characters, but it’s beautifully done. It’s a mesmerising film that captures a true feeling of a dark enchantment, and no matter how outré ‘Neon Demon’ seems in places, you almost want to believe it’s not all that different from what goes on in the shadows backstage at one of these shows. Just as a quick aside, all the performances hit the right chilly tone, but I was particularly taken with Keanu Reeves. He plays a sleazy rooming house owner and isn’t in it all that much, but I just really like his intro scene – we start off by looking at this sinister silhouette behind a grotty sex hotel door, then it flies open, and – Keanu! Wasn’t expecting you to drop in!
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