The Neon Demon

The Neon Demon is a 2016 arthousehorror film^[3][4] 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 generates intense fascination and envy within the fashion industry. Supporting roles are played by Karl Glusman, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, Desmond Harrington, 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 June 24, 2016 by Amazon Studios and Broad Green Pictures. It opened to polarized reviews with praise for Refn's direction, Malone and Fanning's performances, Martinez's score and particular praise for Braier's cinematography, with the screenplay and graphic content receiving criticism. It ultimately grossed $3.6 million against a production budget of $7.5 million.^[2]

Following the unexplained deaths of her parents, 16 year-old aspiring model Jesse has just moved from a small unnamed town in Georgia to Los Angeles. She meets photographer Dean, who does her first shoot, and makeup artist Ruby, who introduces fellow older models Gigi and Sarah, who are interested in her physical appearance and in her sexual experiences, which Jesse pretends to have had.

Jesse is signed by Roberta Hoffman, the owner of a modeling agency, who tells her to pretend that she is nineteen and refers her to a test shoot with notable photographer Jack McCarther.

That same evening, she goes out with Dean, who shows genuine affection for her, as a person. When she returns to her motel room, she finds it has been ravaged by a cougar, who got through the open balcony door. Hank, the lecherous motel owner, has her pay for the damage, though Dean covers it for her.

For the shoot the next day, McCarther has Jesse strip naked and rubs gold paint onto her body. The shoot is successful, and Gigi and Sarah envy Jesse's youth. Jesse goes to a casting call for fashion designer Robert Sarno where Sarah is also present. Sarno pays no attention to Sarah but is entranced by Jesse's beauty. Distraught, Sarah asks her how it feels to be the one everyone admires. Jesse admits, "It's everything," and Sarah lunges toward her. Jesse, pulling away, cuts her hand on a shard of glass. Sarah sucks the blood from Jesse's hand. Jesse rushes back to her motel and faints, hallucinating abstract imagery.

At Sarno's fashion show, Gigi talks to Jesse about cosmetic surgery. As Jesse is closing the show, she has hallucinations of abstract triangular shapes and reflections of herself. After the show, Jesse goes out with Dean to a bar. Sarno engages Dean in a conversation where he negatively contrasts Gigi's surgically-enhanced looks to Jesse's natural beauty and shares his belief that true physical beauty is the most valuable thing there is, outweighing whatever that person may have on the inside. Dean finds the conversation unpleasant and attempts to leave with Jesse, who refuses, having assumed a narcissistic persona.

Jesse has a nightmare of being forced by Hank to sexually swallow a knife. She wakes up to hear someone fidgeting with her door lock. She engages the deadbolt and hears the intruder break into the next room, assaulting the thirteen-year-old female occupant inside (Hank had made implications towards the girl in a previous scene). Terrified, she calls Ruby, who invites Jesse to her home. Ruby makes sexual advances towards Jesse, who immediately rejects them. Jesse reveals to Ruby that she is a virgin, whereupon Ruby attempts to sexually assault her, but is repelled by Jesse. Rejected, Ruby goes to her second job as a cosmetologist at a morgue and pleasures herself with a female corpse.

Ruby returns home, where Jesse encounters Gigi and Sarah, who, along with Ruby, attack and chase Jesse until Ruby pushes her into the deep end of the empty pool. The women butcher Jesse with knives and consume parts of her body before bathing in her blood. Ruby haphazardly washes the empty pool, lies in Jesse's unmarked grave, and at night, nude, inside her house, a torrent of blood gushes from her genitals as she lies bathed in moonlight.

The next day, Gigi and Sarah attend one of Jack's shoots with another model named Annie. Jack is suddenly enthralled by Sarah and fires Annie. In the midst of the shoot, Gigi runs off set, suddenly ill. Sarah watches Gigi vomit up one of Jesse's eyeballs. She screams with regret, "I need to get her out of me," and stabs herself with a pair of scissors, opening her abdomen vertically. Sarah watches Gigi die and eats the regurgitated eyeball before returning to the shoot.

In the end credits' scene, a woman whose face is not shown (but who is wearing Sarah's jacket) walks alone in the Mojave Desert.

On October 22, 2013, it was announced that Refn's new film after Only God Forgives would be a Miami- or Tokyo-set "all-female horror" with "lots of sex" called I Walk with the Dead, with Carey Mulligan attached to star and Polly Stenham writing the script.^[7] On November 3, 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.^[8] Refn commented on the conception of the project: "I woke up one morning a couple of years ago and was like, 'Well, I was never born beautiful, but my wife is,' and I wondered what it had been like going through life with that reality," he says. "I came up with the idea to do a horror film about beauty, not to criticize it or to attack it, but because beauty is a very complex subject. Everyone has an opinion about it."^[9]

En enero de 2015, Dazed informó que el guion de la película se inspiró en Elizabeth Báthory . ^{[ 10 ]} Al hablar del guion, que Refn coescribió con Mary Laws, declaró: "Decidí que ya había hecho suficientes películas sobre hombres violentos y quería hacer una película solo con mujeres, así que se me ocurrió esta historia porque mi esposa solo iba a Los Ángeles si teníamos que viajar fuera de Copenhague. Ella decía: 'Ya terminé con Asia. Solo iré a Los Ángeles'. Así que se me ocurrió una idea, fui a Los Ángeles y elegí a esta mujer llamada Elle Fanning, que es absolutamente fantástica, y ella interpretó el papel principal". ^{[ 11 ]} En entrevistas posteriores, Refn afirmó que visualizó la película como un " cuento de hadas para adultos ". ^{[ 9 ]}

Fundición

El 6 de enero de 2015, Elle Fanning se unió a la película para interpretar a una aspirante a modelo, atrapada en un mundo de belleza y perdición. ^{[ 12 ]} Fanning llamó la atención de Refn debido a su esposa, quien había quedado impresionada por su actuación en una película anterior. ^{[ 13 ]} El 29 de enero, Abbey Lee se agregó al elenco para interpretar el papel de Sarah. ^{[ 14 ]} El 5 de febrero, se agregaron más miembros al elenco de la película, incluyendo a Keanu Reeves , Christina Hendricks , Jena Malone y Bella Heathcote . ^{[ 15 ]} El 17 de marzo de 2015, Karl Glusman fue elegido para protagonizar la película. ^{[ 16 ]} Desmond Harrington se agregó al elenco el 30 de marzo de 2015. ^{[ 17 ]}

En noviembre de 2015, Amazon Studios adquirió los derechos de distribución de la película en Estados Unidos, ^{[ 32 ]} en asociación con Broad Green Pictures . ^{[ 33 ]} The Jokers distribuyó la película en Francia. ^{[ 32 ]} Scanbox Entertainment distribuyó la película en Dinamarca. ^{[ 34 ]}

The film had its world premiere at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2016,^[5][6][35] before it was released in France on June 8, 2016.^[36] The film was then released in Denmark on June 9,^[34] followed by the wide release in the United States on June 24, 2016.^[37][38][39]

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

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.^[40][41] It holds a 59% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 261 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. 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."^[42] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 51 out of 100, based on 45 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".^[43]

En una reseña de cuatro estrellas en The Guardian , Mark Kermode dijo que era "una película impulsada por los mismos placeres culpables que han sustentado durante mucho tiempo el trabajo de Refn", y tuvo elogios particulares para la actuación de Malone. ^{[ 44 ]} Robbie Collin de The Daily Telegraph le dio a la película cinco de cinco estrellas, afirmando, "Cuando la película llega a su punto final lógico, Refn simplemente sigue empujando, y finalmente llega a una secuencia tan asombrosa —casi con seguridad una astuta y brillante reinterpretación de revista del innovador corto surrealista de Luis Buñuel y Salvador Dalí , Un perro andaluz— que lo único que puedes hacer es aullar o aplaudir". ^{[ 45 ]} Tirdad Derakhshani, escribiendo para The Philadelphia Inquirer , llamó a Refn un "artista visionario audaz... capaz de deleitarse en la cultura de la gratificación instantánea mientras también la somete a la crítica", dándole a la película tres estrellas y media de cuatro y llamándola una "obra maestra brutal". ^{[ 46 ]} René Rodríguez, del Miami Herald, escribió positivamente sobre los efectos visuales y la realización experimental de la película, afirmando: «Quejarse de que The Neon Demon carece de sustancia o de que no tiene nada que decir sobre nuestra obsesión cultural con la belleza es perderse el espectáculo loco y desquiciado que se desarrolla ante ti. No todas las películas están hechas para ser leídas como libros; algunas están hechas para ser experimentadas», y continuó calificándola como una «película que garantiza provocar fuertes reacciones». Le otorgó tres de cuatro estrellas. ^{[ 47 ]} La escritora Natasha Stagg interpretó la película a través de la teoría del deseo mimético de René Girard , ^{[ 48 ]} y especuló que su fracaso en taquilla se debió a que su sustancia estaba «demasiado cerca de su propio objetivo». ^{[ 49 ]}

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.)"^[50] 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."^[51]The Telegraph's Tim Robey deemed The Neon Demon the "most offensive film of the year," specifically citing its necrophilia sequence as exploitative, though he conceded it is not "any fault of Malone’s, who commits herself utterly to making it an anguished, desperate, if inevitably revolting minute or so of screen time. It’s a question of context, and how this scene – which stands alone, advancing nothing in the overall arc of the story, and is one of very few not to feature Fanning – slots into the film’s overall thesis."^[52]

The French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma named The Neon Demon the third-best film of 2016.^[53]

• Refn, Nicolas Winding; Fanning, Elle (2016). The Neon Demon (Blu-ray audio commentary). Broadgreen Pictures.

• The Neon Demon at IMDb 
• The Neon Demon at Box Office Mojo
• The Neon Demon at Metacritic
• The Neon Demon at Rotten Tomatoes