The Neon Demon

The Neon Demon was curiously disappointing affair. I’m giving it a 4 out of 10, and most of those points are for the visuals, for the darkly atmospheric settings, the great use of colour and contrast and imagery, the glamourous sinister sensuous beauty of the film, and the soundtrack which accompanied the film perfectly.

Despite the hype, however, with crowds booing it at Cannes and walk-outs of the audience when it was first shown, it wasn’t frightening.

The film drifts through the surreal entry of naïve sixteen year-old Jesse (Elle Fanning) to the LA modelling industry, with no parents or family, living in an eerie motel run by a pervy scumbag (Keanu Reeves). Jesse builds an uneasy friendship with Ruby (Jena Malone) who grabs the psycho lesbian baton and runs with it right from the start where she eyes up Jesse with a lusty, over-lingering stare, but it’s also pretty clear that she doesn’t have Jesse’s best interests at heart after continually steering her into uncomfortable encounters with two veteran models: Gigi (Bella Heathcote) whose beauty is artificially constructed by extensive plastic surgery, and Sarah (Abbey Lee), whose mental stability is crumbling as it becomes clear that she’s yesterday’s “sour milk” and the industry increasingly prefers “fresh meat” like Jesse.

As the film progresses and Jesse’s star rises with the interest of a top fashion designer and a famous photographer, she becomes more detached from the ordinary life represented by her almost boyfriend Dean and becomes more egotistical and arrogant, rubbing her natural loveliness in the face of Gigi’s plasticity and her fresh youthfulness against Sarah’s rapidly approaching expiry date.

Jesse rejects a come-on by Ruby, who goes to her second job as a morgue make-up artist and masturbates while kissing a female corpse, fantasising about untouchable Jesse. Ruby later joins Gigi and Sarah in chasing Jesse through a mansion in the dark until they corner her by an empty pool and push her in. Ruby is later seen bathing in Jesse’s blood while Gigi and Sarah shower together to wash off the gory murder, and we find out at the end of the film that they cannibalised Jesse when Gigi throws up an eyeball, which looks so fake that it’s not even gross.

Breaking it down, there are startlingly few real “horror” moments in the film: (1) Jesse has a nightmare about the motel manager forcing a knife down her throat as a grotesque metaphor for oral sodomy; (2) Jesse listens against the wall while the motel manager rapes the thirteen year old runaway next door, depicted only in her muffled screams, after the motel manager failed to break into Jesse’s room; (3) Ruby’s cringeworthy masturbation scene on the corpse, which includes spitting into its mouth so kissing it seems more like kissing a person; (4) Jesse’s death, where she is shown broken and disarrayed like a dropped marionette on the floor of the pool in spreading blood; (5) the bloody shower and bath; (6) Gigi throwing up an eyeball and stabbing herself to death in the stomach; (7) and a weird scene of Ruby lying naked in a room, blood flooding from her shadowed genitals, like a man’s odd idea of menstruation.

These all take place in the last quarter of the film and there’s nothing that made me horrified – just an “ew” reaction like finding a rotting bird in the grass full of maggots. No one’s sympathetic and it all just feels contrived. The film doesn’t bother to go deep into anyone’s motivations or why Ruby suddenly turned against Jesse and incited Gigi and Sarah to turn up to kill her.