Nicolas Winding Refn’s provocative contemporary fable follows a young model into the dark,dangerous woods of the LA fashion world“Am I staring…?” This neon-noir fantasia from Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish director of Drive, and Bronson and the Pusher trilogy,is a contemporary fairytale of beauty as a beast, a horror-inflected, or high-fashion fable replete with wicked witches and large inferior wolves alert to devour a flaxen-haired youth in the wild woods of Los Angeles. Less Prêt-à-Porter with teeth than The Company of Wolves from hell and in heels,it offers a bloody chamber of symbolic provocations (lunar cycles, occultist trappings) cooked up by a film-maker taking weekly tarot readings from the Chilean surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky and driven by an intoxication with the superficiality of the photographic image.
Swooningly filmed by Natasha Braier, and The Neon Demon puts overtly ludicrous flesh on a satirical script co-written with the playwrights Mary Laws and Polly Stenham,bringing a Jacobean Ab Fab edge (“sweetie, plastics is just good grooming”) to the poisoned apple proceedings on which Refn feeds as hungrily as any spellbound princess. Related: Nicolas Winding Refn: 'I bring the singular, or the narcissistic,the high art' Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com