Review of The Neon Demon (2016) by Phillipé S — 18 Nov 2016

Its "Black Swan" on Xanax. "The Craft" on a heavy dose of lithium and without the 90's naiveté and hair color hat tricks. This witch is blonde from beginning to end.

Imagine if Natalie Portman had just skipped the months of intense ballet training and instead sat around in haute couture and makeup that would send a drag queen into fits and only fantasized about being a ballet dancer instead of actually BEING one and you'll have more than scratched the enameled surface of the only thing thinner than "The Neon Demon's" subjects, its plot.

An amply hypnotic Elle Fanning as Jesse, is Nomi Malone for 2010's Los Angeles, a slab of porcelain pulled from the swamps of Georgia, riding her deer-in-headlights routine til the wheels fall off. As she begins landing coveted modeling gigs and rousing the ire of a pair of slightly more seasoned girls, Sarah (Abbey Lee) and Gigi (Bella Heathcoate), she finds herself courted by her makeup artist, Ruby (Jena Malone), a questionably benevolent shepherd, steering her through the seamy gut of high fashion modeling.

Vaseline and glitter are smeared across the lens at every turn as Jesse descends into a druggy labyrinth of narcissism and poisonous envy where every lamb is a wolf and every wolf a lamb. Abbey Lee, most notable as one of the livestock wives from "Mad Max: Fury Road" and Jena Malone offer the film's most memorable performances. Unfortunately not even their Macbeth-ian Weird Sisters routine, nor the cohesion of director Nicolas Winding Refn's aesthetic can save "Demon" from hanging itself on the strands of plot it lets flag loose in the wind.

Characters of potential heft move in and out of the narrative like vapors, leaving neither scent nor coloration to signify they were ever even there. Successful elements from other films are implemented but to diluted effect. Each frame is suffused with a gilded-LSD style and a precision that works in films like Panos Cosmatos' "Beyond the Black Rainbow", where overwhelming aesthetic can mask narrative dissonance, but simply doesn't provide a frame of requisite sturdiness on which "Demon" might hang its flesh.

The thread comparison is apt, imagine Refn as a weaver of rugs. With "Demon" he has selected all the best materials and laid them with skill upon the loom, but leaves no more than a pitch perfect foundation for something that could've transcended the realm of both art film and tightly-plotted supernatural melodrama, but in not reaching far enough, falls short of both.