Review of The Neon Demon (2016) by Kevin A — 24 Jun 2016

No film has boasted a larger collection of rail thin size zero, size two bags of bones, aka high fashion models, than this bizarre meditation on the superficiality of high fashion (isn't that redundant?).

Elle Fanning plays Jesse, a just arrived from mid America girl dreaming of hitting it big in modeling. She strikes it rich right away, chosen over veterans Abbey Lee and Bella Heathcoate (if you can call a wispy barely 20 something a veteran).

Jesse lives in a dirt bag motel in Pasadena, doesn't have a car, so why Pasadena? The motel is managed, if that's the right word, by Keanu Reeves, doing his dirty nasty best to be a leacherous bastard of a landlord.

That's just one of the nonsensical aspects to this meditation on self absorption and narcissism. Jesse is not super hot gorgeous enough to pole vault to the front of the fashion runway, but she does anyway.

Along the way she meets Ruby. Ruby is a hanger-oner to do make up at fashion shoots. Where did Ruby learn her craft? At a mortuary of course. The visuals are truly striking the the EDM heavy score fits just right, as a Springsteen ditty just would be so out of place.

Spoiler alert: There is a bizarre scene of necrophilia in the mortuary that is gruesome, gross, bizarre and not for the faint of stomach or sight. There is gratutious violence and shots linger just a bit too long but then you realize that it was just the right amount of screen time to saturate the viewer and draw the viewer, as a voyeur, into this quasi-horror indulgence.

There really is no acting. It's all posing actually, but then what else do models do, but pose? The concept was vastly better explored in Darren Aronofsky's 2010 Black Swan with Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis and Winona Ryder-those girls can act.

But the babes in this self-indulgent exercise pose and talk, usually about very little. Can't say I want my time or money back, but think carefully before you expend yours to see this. The director Nicholas Refn gave us a super taut thriller in "Drive" with Jake Gyllenhal, but this is no "Drive".