The Neon Demon (2016)

Plot of The Neon Demon: A young woman, Jesse, takes a room in a motel in L.A. and attempts to break into the modelling business. She is helped at the outset by Ruby a make-up artist, who moonlights doing the same job in a morticians. Ruby has two model friends, Gigi and Sarah and  Sarah, Gigi and Jesse audition for various gigs, Jesse always being chosen over the other two. They are envious. Meanwhile back in the motel Jesse dreams about being molested by Hank the motel manager, but it turns out that he was molesting a fourteen year old in the next room. Now and again Jesse sees a triangular motif hovering in the air. Ruby, it turns out, has designs on Jesse, but Jesse rejects her advances, so the scene is set for a distressing denouement.

Content: The whole film is presented with a dream like quality. There is quite a bit of female nudity and even more of young women in their underwear, but the only actual sex might be Ruby engaged in necrophilia with a female corpse in the morticians. Later Gigi and Sarah shower together, revealingly. In virtually the whole film no-one really has any facial expression. There is a sort of brooding quality, requiring us to watch, if solely to find out what the hell is going on. There is drinking and smoking and inferred cannibalism.

A View: This film did not cost much to make, in movie terms, but even so has not recovered its production costs at the box office.  Unsurprisingly Mark Kermode gave it four out of five stars, however the New York Times critic called it ‘ridiculous and puerile’. I can see that there may possibly be a message there about the  beauty business, but one thing it is not is a fun feature, and do I really want to see a distorted vision of a segment of the L.A. subculture. Well, I’ve watched it so you don’t have to.

Fun Fact: At the Cannes Film Festival the film was booed and cheered at the same screening.