The Neon Demon

The Neon Demon
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Nicolas Winding Refn
Produced by	Lene Børglum Nicolas Winding Refn
Screenplay by	Mary Laws Nicolas Winding Refn Polly Stenham
Story by	Nicolas Winding Refn
Starring	Elle Fanning Karl Glusman Jena Malone Bella Heathcote Abbey Lee Christina Hendricks Keanu Reeves
Music by	Cliff Martinez
Cinematography	Natasha Braier
Edited by	Matthew Newman
Production companies	Gaumont Film Company Wild Bunch Space Rocket Nation Vendian Entertainment Bold Films
Distributed by	Amazon Studios Broad Green Pictures Scanbox Entertainment The Jokers
Release dates	20 May 2016 (2016-05-20) (Cannes) 8 June 2016 (2016-06-08) (France) 9 June 2016 (2016-06-09) (Denmark) 24 June 2016 (2016-06-24) (United States)
Running time	117 minutes[1]
Country	France Denmark United States
Language	English
Budget	$7 million[2]
Box office	$3.3 million[3]

The Neon Demon is a 2016 psychological horror^[4] film directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, co-written by Mary Laws, Polly Stenham, and Refn, and starring Elle Fanning. The plot follows an aspiring model in Los Angeles whose beauty and youth generate intense fascination and jealousy within the industry. Supporting roles are played by Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, Karl Glusman, Christina Hendricks, and Keanu Reeves.

An international co-production between France, Denmark, and the United States, the film competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival,^[5][6] the third consecutive film directed by Refn to do so, following Drive (2011) and Only God Forgives (2013). In the United States, the film was released theatrically on 24 June 2016 by Amazon Studios and Broad Green Pictures. It opened to polarizing reviews and was a box office failure, grossing a little over $3 million from a $7 million budget.

Plot

Sixteen-year-old aspiring model Jesse (Elle Fanning) has just moved from small-town Georgia to Los Angeles. Her first photoshoot is done by Dean (Karl Glusman). She meets makeup artist Ruby (Jena Malone), who introduces fellow older models Sarah (Abbey Lee) and Gigi (Bella Heathcote). The three women are intrigued by Jesse's natural beauty, as well as curious about her sexual proclivities. Jesse feigns experience in the latter.

Jesse gets signed by the owner of a big modelling agency (Christina Hendricks), who tells her to pretend she is nineteen and refers her to a test shoot with a notable photographer, Jack (Desmond Harrington). Jesse goes on a date with Dean, but keeps his advances at bay. She returns to her motel room to find it ransacked and occupied by a feline resembling a cougar. The unsavory manager, Hank (Keanu Reeves), demands that she pay for the damages. Jesse goes to the photo shoot with Jack, who calls for a closed set and covers her naked body in gold paint. The shoot is successful, and Gigi and Sarah begin envying Jesse's youth, while Ruby is fascinated with her.

Jesse goes to a casting call for fashion designer Robert Sarno (Alessandro Nivola), where Sarah is also present. He pays no attention to Sarah but is entranced by Jesse. A distraught Sarah asks her how it feels to be the one who everyone admires, and Jesse admits, "It's everything." Sarah lunges toward her, and Jesse accidentally cuts her hand on glass. Sarah immediately sucks the blood from Jesse's hand. Jesse rushes back to her motel, and faints, hallucinating strange images. Dean arrives, pays Hank for the damage to her room, and treats Jesse's wound.

At Sarno's fashion show, Gigi tells Jesse about all the work she has had done, and expresses disbelief that Jesse has not used casting couches to achieve success. As Jesse is closing the show, she sees a vision of the glowing triangle she saw before in her hallucination, and kisses her reflection inside a prism. After the show, a visibly-changed Jesse goes out with Dean to a bar. There, Sarno denigrates women who have cosmetic surgery, using a humiliated Gigi as an example. In contrast, he praises Jesse's natural looks and declares that "beauty isn't everything; it's the only thing." Dean challenges this view and tries to convince Jesse to leave, but she is now displaying a narcissistic new persona.

Jesse has a nightmare of Hank forcing her to sexually swallow a knife. She wakes up in time to hear someone fidgeting with her door lock. She quickly turns the lock, but is forced to listen as the intruder instead breaks into her neighbor's room and assaults her. Terrified, she calls Ruby, who tells her to come over. Ruby then tries to initiate sex with her, but Jesse rejects her. Upset, Ruby draws a diagram on her mirror and leaves for her second job as a makeup artist for a morgue. There, she pleasures herself with a female corpse.

Ruby returns home and finds Jesse now unabashed in her narcissism. Jesse is attacked by Gigi and Sarah, who chase her carrying knives. Ruby suddenly pushes Jesse into a huge empty swimming pool. Jesse is fatally wounded, her leg broken, her head gushing blood. The three women approach her with knives. Ruby is then seen in a bathful of blood, presumably Jesse's; Sarah and Gigi are washing blood off in the shower. Ruby's topless body shows occult tattoos as she waters some flowers outside. She later lies in Jesse's unmarked grave and performs a ritual, culminating in her returning inside where the moon can be glimpsed through a large window. A torrent of blood issues from Ruby's genitals.

The next day, Sarah drives Gigi to Jack's photoshoot. Sarah nonchalantly states to another model she once ate a girl who 'screwed her out of a job', visibly disturbing Gigi. Jack is suddenly enthralled with Sarah and asks her to replace the other model. In the midst of the shoot, Gigi feels ill and leaves. Sarah follows her and watches Gigi vomit up one of Jesse's eyeballs. She screams with regret, "I need to get her out of me", and stabs her own stomach with a pair of scissors, cutting open her abdomen. Sarah watches Gigi die, and then eats the regurgitated eyeball. Sarah sheds a tear and exits the room.

Cast

Production

Director Nicolas Winding Refn promoting the film at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival.

On 3 November 2014, Refn's production company Space Rocket Nation alongside its co-financiers Gaumont Film Company and Wild Bunch announced that Refn's next film would be titled The Neon Demon, to be filmed in Los Angeles in early 2015.^[7]

In January 2015, Dazed reported that the script for the film was inspired by Elizabeth Báthory.^[8] In discussing the script, which Refn co-wrote with Mary Laws, he stated: "I decided that I’d made enough films about violent men, and I wanted to do a film with only women in the film, and so I did this story because my wife would only go to L.A. if we had to travel out of Copenhagen. She’s like, ‘I’m done with Asia. I will only do Los Angeles.’ And so I came up with an idea and went to L.A., and I cast this woman called Elle Fanning who is absolutely fantastic, and she played the lead."^[9]

Casting

Star Elle Fanning at the Cannes Film Festival.

On 6 January 2015, Elle Fanning joined the film to play an aspiring model, caught in a world of beauty and demise.^[10] On 29 January, Abbey Lee Kershaw was added to the cast to play the role of Sarah.^[11] On 5 February, more cast was added to the film, including Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks, Jena Malone and Bella Heathcote.^[12] On 17 March 2015, Karl Glusman was set to star in the film.^[13] Desmond Harrington was added to the cast on 30 March 2015.^[14]

Filming

Principal photography on the film began in Los Angeles on 30 March 2015.^[15][16]

Soundtrack

Composer Cliff Martinez, who collaborated with director Refn on Drive, stated the films have similar styles, musically speaking, noting that for The Neon Demon he sought a "sparse electronic score."^[17] He stated in an interview that the first half of the film resembles "a melodrama like Valley of the Dolls, and the second half is like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre."^[17] The soundtrack is strongly reminiscent of 70s and 80s electronic music, especially (by Refn's and Martinez's own admission^[18][19][20]) Giorgio Moroder, Goblin, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream.

The soundtrack for the film was released on 24 June 2016, physically and through digital download, before being released on Vinyl on 8 July 2016, by Milan Records.^[21] Sia composed an original song for the film titled "Waving Goodbye".^[22] On 24 May 2016 at the Cannes Soundtrack 2016 awards, Cliff Martinez was recognised best composer of the Cannes film festival for his soundtrack to The Neon Demon.^[23]

Release

In November 2015, Amazon Studios acquired distribution rights to the film in the United States,^[24] in partnership with Broad Green Pictures.^[25] The Jokers will distribute the film in France.^[24] Scanbox Entertainment will distribute the film in Denmark.^[26]

The film had its world premiere at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on 20 May 2016,^[5][6][27] before it was released in France on 8 June 2016.^[28] The film was then released in Denmark on 9 June,^[26] followed by the United States on 24 June 2016.^[29][30][31]

The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray on September 27, 2016.

Critical response

The Neon Demon received a mixed response from critics. Much like Refn's previous film, Only God Forgives, the film received both boos and a standing ovation during its premiere at Cannes Film Festival.^[32][33] It holds a 55% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 183 reviews, with an average rating of 5.8/10. The site's consensus reads, "The Neon Demon is seductively stylish, but Nicolas Winding Refn's assured eye can't quite compensate for an underdeveloped plot and thinly written characters."^[34] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 51 out of 100, based on 45 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".^[35]

Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph gave the film five out of five stars, stating, "When the film reaches its logical end point, Refn just keeps pushing, and eventually lands on a sequence so jaw-dropping – almost certainly a sly, glossy-magazine refashioning of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's groundbreaking surrealist short Un Chien Andalou – that all you can do is howl or cheer."^[36] Tirdad Derakhshani, writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer, called Refn a "bold visionary artist... able to revel in the culture of instant gratification while also subjecting it to critique", giving the film three and a half out of four stars and calling it a "brutal masterpiece".^[37] Rene Rodriguez of The Miami Herald wrote positively of the film's visuals and experimental filmmaking, writing, "To complain that The Neon Demon lacks substance or that it doesn't have anything to say about our cultural obsession with beauty is to miss the crazy, cracked pageant unfolding in front of you. Not all movies are intended to be read like books; some are meant to be experienced," going on to call it a "film that is guaranteed to elicit strong reactions." He awarded the film three out of four stars.^[38]

Owen Gleiberman of Variety gave the film a mixed review: "A horror film is what The Neon Demon is (sort of). It’s set in the Los Angeles fashion world, and it’s the kind of movie in which models look like mannequins that look like slasher-film corpses, and corpses look like love objects. Beauty mingles with mangled flesh, and each fastidiously slick image seems to have come out of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me or The Shining or a very sick version of a Calvin Klein commercial. Every scene, every shot, every line of dialogue, every pause is so hypnotically composed, so luxuriously overdeliberate, that the audience can't help but assume that Refn knows exactly what he's doing – that he's setting us up for the kill. He is, but not if you're on the lookout for a movie that makes sense. (Oh, that.)"^[39] Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter gave the film a negative review and called it "A stultifyingly vapid, ponderously paced allegorical critique of the modeling world whose seethingly jealous inhabitants can't wait to literally chew each other up and spit each other out". Glenn Kenny of The New York Times criticized the film as "ridiculous and puerile," and opined, "Mr. Refn composes striking images, but they're all secondhand: faux Fellini, faux David Lynch and so on."^[40]

The prestigious French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma named The Neon Demon the third best film of 2016. ^[41]

See also

• Star 80
• Starry Eyes
• Suspiria

References

External links

• Official website
• The Neon Demon at the Internet Movie Database
• The Neon Demon at AllMovie
• The Neon Demon at Box Office Mojo
• The Neon Demon at Metacritic
• The Neon Demon at Rotten Tomatoes