31 Days of Horror: The Neon Demon is a visual spectacle

The Neon Demon is a 2016 psychological horror film by acclaimed director Nicholas Winding Refn, starring Elle Fanning as Jesse, a 16-year-old aspiring model who just moved from small town Georgia to the bright lights of Los Angeles and is looking to jumpstart a career in the industry. She meets a makeup artist named Ruby (Jena Malone), and two other models, Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee), who befriend her. As her career launches, so does the danger factor, sinking young Jesse deeply into the quicksand of LA and the toxic modeling industry.

This film, like almost every Refn film, looks stunning. The bright neon colors, the stunning set pieces, the long shots of simple modeling, the pulsing synthetic pop music bumping in the background. The entire film feels like a fever hallucination, and it floats along making the runtime feel hazy and dreamlike. I learned Refn is actually colorblind and can only see the shades being different, and this makes his films all the more impressive. The marriage of the soundtrack to the striking visuals is the foundation of this film, with multiple original songs being written for it. With all the success of The Substance, many people point this film out as the original beauty horror film, but I think they are incredibly different. While The Substance really zeroes in on the beauty and youth obsession in our culture, I find The Neon Demon to be more of a character study on the corruption of innocence in a toxic industry and how it can literally consume someone for the advancement of others.

This film is incredibly divisive, with many people citing the shallowness of the characters and the weak dialogue as the issues. I think there is validity in that, but I do think many of those choices were intentional. There are incredibly vain models who are constantly trying to one up each other and secretly hate each other, one of which is 16 and from a small town in Georgia. These aren't going to be intellectually challenging conversations. The characters are indeed designed to be shallow and simple. Deeply layered intellectual conversations would have personally taken me out of it. The film is long and self indulgent, and it has scenes that linger on far past when they should cut off. This makes the film unnecessarily cumbersome. However, if you enjoy the style, you can lose yourself in the dreaminess of it all and find the run time slide right by.

Fanning puts on an impeccable performance here in my opinion. She is acting very visually throughout. She doesn't have a ton of dialogue that subsidizes her character but you can visually see her go from unconfident and innocent to vain and narcissistic right before your eyes. The supporting cast is great and the one particular scene with Jena Malone (yes that one) is truly insane. Ultimately, there is just a lot to chew on here that Refn gives. It's not going to be for everyone but it is a fascinating fantastical horror film that flew under a lot of radars.

You can stream Neon Demon this spooky season on Prime Video.