The Neon Demon

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. (12/09/2016)

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. (25/09/2016)

After I watched this movie, I’ve got the feeling that Nicolas Winding Refn is drowning in his own filmmaking utopias. I get that the Neon Demon has a clear premise about modelling, but I don’t get the artistic pathos they’re using to get to the point. Sure, many of the scenes are very interesting and very pleasing to the eye, but as a whole, I feel like the movie’s just a concurrence of different scenes that don’t make much sense. The director’s lucky that he can choose the right music to his video. I fell for it with Drive, but it was a bit harder this time. (23/11/2016)

The protagonist moves to Los Angels to start a modeling career and, as everyone is impressed by her natural beauty, her career grows at a tremendous rate, which some of her competitors can not tolerate. The film has a slower pace, not much talking and there are some very long takes, but it's a fantastic cinematography and audiovisual experience. It’s horror maybe in the last 15 minutes or so, the rest is more of a hypnotic and audiovisual drama, but it has a lot going for it. PS: I didn't like the main character. 60% (07/09/2016)

A non-mainstream, visually captivating, hypnotically immersive experience for those who can appreciate Nicolas Winding Refn's extraordinary visual sensibilities. But Refn is also explicitly provocative, completely unnecessarily so, and I could really do without a few scenes (sex in the morgue, yuck!). So when I add up the pros and cons, Refn ends up with a draw, but the kid has talent for more, much more. That's probably how Jaromil Jireš would shoot it when he was making Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, he would be a bit of a pervert and permanently on drugs. (06/10/2016)