The Neon Demon

”Beauty isn't everything. It's the only thing.” Beautiful opening and end credits, largely thanks to Cliff Martinez, who looks like he might become one of the greatest film composers of the future. But that’s where the enthusiasm ends. It would be a pity if we stopped looking forward to Refn’s movies and were instead only curious about them. It seems like that is what he tried to achieve here, forgetting that he earned his biggest success (not just in Cannes) thanks to a story with heart (Drive), elevated by his unique style of directing, not by that style alone. The Neon Demon is a simple film with a clear message. There is no puzzle arousing exciting intellectual debates like in Only God Forgives. In its simplicity and lack of surprising elements, the film replaces the possibility of getting emotionally involved in the story with purely visual storytelling, which looks attractive but leaves the viewer unmoved. But I guess you should see this, at least because of the slobbering over a corpse we’ve never seen in an A-movie before. [Cannes] (05/20/2016)

It's as terribly empty, resigned, and exhausted as you would expect from the brief. Once again it's a photo-novel, once again everything there merely serves the purpose of setting the scene, only unlike the previous Only God Forgives, this one is still horribly unoriginal. A thousand well-worn allusions to the lifelessness of top modeling only generate pretty shots without context and such a desperately effort at controversy that I winced even when Jena Malone was getting it on with a corpse. Think! And it’s a pity, because I want to watch an android in makeup vomit up an eyeball. Because Refn should take a cue from Drive and work on planting his style in a genre world where both can blossom and enrich each other. As it is, he'll only get derisive giggles from the cinema during the stilted dialogue and unsuccessful, overwrought spiritualism. How aptly the film is described by a scene in which an artificial model, remade with thousands of operations, proudly boasts that her plastic surgeon calls her the "bionic woman", whereupon she receives the disgusted response "And that's supposed to be a compliment?" (09/23/2016)

An audio-visual feast with fantastic acting performances (an excellent Desmond Harrington). The inner storyline is quite interesting, but overall the story lacks dynamism. As always, Winding Refn is in no hurry, but unfortunately the world of modeling offers no excuse for action, which occasionally helped Drive forward a little (also in places in Only God Forgives), the lesson is fairly simple, bizarre, but still clear, but it’s difficult to sum up the entire movie in a single intellectual exercise about the significance of individual scenes. The main problem, apart from the traditional remoteness, was the length. And so you must see the movie if only for the corpse licker and the visually refined composition of images. You’ll have to battle against viewer fatigue, because the Neon Demon has no soul. (09/24/2016)

Pubertal provocation. Refn was able to show the depth of the surface in such a way that a similar emptied mess full of dull script clichés could hardly upset a person. In addition, NRW directs poorly this time. Wooden dialogues, clip sequences that every little talented advertising director can handle, whilst the great Elle and Cliff Martinez's electro-arpeggio take care of all the dynamics. I was expecting hypnosis, but this is a sedative. [Cannes 2016] (05/20/2016)

Refn is one of those directors that I always wished would make a horror film. The announcement of Neon Demon fulfilled one of my dreams as a cinemagoer and the expectations couldn’t have been higher. After the responses from the première in Cannes, I still believed the film will grip and captivate me instead of sending me to the other side of the fence, with the disgusted and annoyed viewers. But in the end it was worse – it was just meh! Boring. It didn’t arouse any emotions, positive or negative. Audiovisually, it’s beautifully empty. (09/12/2016)