Review of The Neon Demon (2016) by Elizabeth Y — 26 Jun 2016

Nicolas Winding Refn's (or NWR, NWR, NWR, as the movie insists on repeating multiple times in the opening credits) approach to his movies, at least since Drive, is simple. Take a basic, even banal story and inane dialog and infuse it with an artificial sense of profundity and meaning with extra long, lingering takes and striking visuals. End the movie in an explosion of graphic, orgiastic, violence.

This time, however, the story is so vapid, the characters so hollow and the dialog so stupid that even this recipe fails. The are Lynchian elements in the movie, Lynch as interpreted for commercials.

A sad mess. Worse, an utter bore.