Is ‘The Neon Demon’ The Best Film Ever Or A Complete Nightmare?

THE NEON DEMON

The Neon Demon is the best-looking film of 2016. To a certain kind of cineaste, that will make it the best film of 2016. If you visit cinemas as if they’re temples, and seek to gaze up at glorious images that feel as bewildering and vivid as dreams, then the latest Nicolas Winding Refn flick is two hours of celluloid magic.

If a picture says a thousand words, trying to convey the majesty of a single frame, here, is a fool’s errand. That said: its most striking sequence is a single tableaux that pans across a cavernous fluorescent-lit warehouse populated by a single photo-shoot, its figures remaining static as we hear the explosion of a popping flash, then the white-noise whir that follows. It’s a work of astonishing production design, art direction, and meticulous photography; a blinding hall-of-light that feels as if beamed in from a science-fiction film. It perfectly embodies the essential text of the film: that in a culture obsessed with the way things look —especially women— image is everything.

This makes The Neon Demon a delightful, divisive work: it’s a nasty critique of the fashion world that indulges in the things it’s out to criticise; a pretty, pretty-vacant grotesquerie that’s as cold, cruel, and vicious as all the horrific acts it depicts. On the scales of style vs substance, it’s all of one, none of the other. The film is slow, static, ponderous: its rapturous images a glorious distraction from the fact that it’s essentially empty: a bright, luminous, lurid bauble; a bubble that could be popped with a single sceptical pin-prick. But it also trades in that emptiness: its warehouse spaces are full of silence, echoes, precise sound-design; Cliff Martinez’s synth score put on hold to hear swallowed spit, caught breath, squeaking heels.

Where Drive, Refn’s last portrait of the Los Angeles as neon-lit hellscape, housed an old-fashioned action-hero/damsel-in-distress narrative, here there’s no one to cheer for. As in the world it’s depicting, its figures aren’t meant to resemble humans, just idealised projections; caring for a character herein like developing feelings for a mannequin. Its performances, too, are borderline non-existent, symbolised by the fact that Elle Fanning —the greatest young actor in the world— plays a bland cut-out blessed with not an ounce of depth.

Fanning plays the archetypal —the innocent type, deer-in-the-headlights— new-girl-in-town, a gormless rube fresh-off-the-bus, out to make it as a model in LA. In its early stretches, it’s like a surrealist update of Showgirls: a satirical portrait of the pathetic All-American dream dying in the face of cruel capitalist exploitation; a look at lithe young flesh being peddled by the predatory and rapacious. Jena Malone plays the kindly make-up assistant who takes Fanning under her wing; Christina Hendricks the agent who flags Fanning for stardom; Karl Glusman the earnest love-interest.

Desmond Harrington, Alessandro Nivola, and Keanu Reeves play the gazing men —creepy photographers, lecherous designer, and prowling motel pimp— who linger as a vague, amorphous threat. Glusman often dwells in the shadows, too, just staring. Fanning grows paranoid with the threat of male sexual advances, and male violence; and seeks comfort in the arms of some imaginary sisterhood. But, in the world of The Neon Demon, the world of models —as embodied by Abbey Lee and Bella Heathcote, matching gamine Australian blondes— is vicious, competitive, evil; the only way to succeed by belittling, battling, and literally beating your rivals. Success and failure is a dark matter of life and death; the arrival of a hot new girl in town enough to make you a ghost. It’s a dog-eat-dog world literalised as a blonde-eat-blonde one; young flesh not just peddled, but cannibalised.

Whilst there’s —eventually— buckets of stylised blood, the stock genre description of The Neon Demon as “psychological horror” doesn’t capture what’s happening here. There’s not enough humanity to come close to being a study of psychology; and, lacking either clear victim or villain, it doesn’t have the simple survival-instinct rush of a horror movie. But, whilst there’s no hero in the narrative, there’s clearly a hero at work. The Neon Demon is the kind of exercise in audacious auteurism that can only heroise its maker: Refn is so boldly, singularly the driving force at work, here, that his presence lingers in every frame.

For a certain kind of viewer, this cinematic nightmare will feel too much like a nightmare-in-the-cinema: a self-satisfied, self-aggrandising work in which quaint notions like character, plot, structure, and genre fall by the wayside, eclipsed by the artistic ego of the author. But, for others, seeing The Neon Demon will be like entering a glorious, unparalleled dream; a sensorial delight that feels like an undeniable experience.

THE HANDMAIDEN

After failing to set Hollywood ablaze with the quietly-perverse thrills of his English language debut, Stoker, Park Chan-wook has returned to South Korea and come back triumphant. The Handmaiden, the wild stylist’s eighth feature, is one of 2016’s great cinematic thrill rides: a work of giddy decadence, depravity, and debauchery; a parlour-game whose mutual unreliable-narrators, kept secrets, and smirking reversals bring back fond memories of Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige. Except, whilst still delivering those touches —the shadowy locales, hyper-stylised set-pieces, grandstanding camera moves, perverse villains, and giant squid in a tank— that make it signature Park.

At the film’s beginning, audiences are in-the-dark: thrown into the dead of night, and a state of bewilderment and confusion. The lowly servant of the title (Kim Tae-ri) has arrived at a Japanese manor-house to tend to its glamorous lady (Kim Min-hee), but all is not what it seems. Our handmaiden is a grifter who’s working with a counterfeit Count (Ha Jung-woo), who intends to marry the lady and steal her wealth. Lurking, deep in a dark library on the property, is the Lady’s uncle (Jo Jin-woong), a collector of rare books, erotic fiction, tentacle porn, and bondage equipment. The four engage in an ever-evolving game of subversion, evasion, manipulation, and confabulation; the early darkness and confusion taking two hours to clear.

The Handmaiden is based on Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith, whose punning title suggested its dual obsessions with pickpockets and forbidden lesbian lust in Victorian England. Park translates the tale to 1930s occupied Korea, its class distinctions —and the upstairs/downstairs divide— now loaded with the weight of Japanese imperialism; here, upward mobility for Korean orphans is to be sold into a Japanese family, to be raised on the right side of the ethnic divide. None of the cast are Japanese, but, beneath their social façades, nor are their characters: befitting a time in which social ‘success’ was passing yourself off as someone and something else.

This, of course, leads The Handmaiden all kinds of devilish mystery. It’s a film in which no one is who they say they are or what they’re pretending to be; where revelations tear away a mask only to reveal another beneath. Echoing the structure of Waters’ novel, it’s told in three parts, from three different perspectives; pivoting to shine a different view on events, illuminating once-shadowing things. But even within each section, the story circles events various times, dances back into the past. Park revels in introducing seemingly banal items —a coil of rope, a letter, a painting— and, only later, revealing their true nature. It’s a joy to experience, effectively playing as a series of cinematic sleights-of-hand, first duping, then delighting viewers daring enough to go along for the ride.

JULIETA

Pedro Almodóvar boasted that 2013’s I’m So Excited was his “gayest” film, but it was also his worst; a zany sex-farce wielding broad stereotypes and camp clichés beamed in from such outdated sketch-comedy show. It seemed especially trivial and lamentable given that Almodóvar had spent years moving away from the simple shocks of his ‘punk’ ’80s days, smuggling his subversive spirit into decadent melodramas loaded with thematic weight, unafraid of genuine darkness. His great growth, over time, was as a screenwriter; films like Talk To Her, Broken Embraces, and The Skin I Live In works of labyrinthine construction, mysteries in which the past and present dance in pirouettes of moving narrative parts.

Julieta arrives, then, as fabulous atonement for his last misstep. It may not be Almodóvar’s finest hour, but it’s a stirring example of the director’s late-period predilections. It’s, essentially, a missing-girl mystery that’s also an exploration of identity; the film about the notion of the narrative of one’s life, how it gets told and re-told, considered and re-considered. Almodóvar takes three short-stories from Alice Munro’s 2004 collection Runaway, and turns them into one single tale of a mother obsessed with the disappearance of her daughter.

The mother is the titular character; but even calling her a ‘mother’ makes it seem too static. She’s played, in her early years, by Adriana Ugarte, and in her later years, by Emma Suárez, an actress rarely seen on screen since her Julio Medem-directed glory-days of the ’90s. Julieta follows her through the years, both in the present —where Suárez writes a letter to her daughter— and in the past; but it’s less a work of dual narratives than a melodrama made mosaic; the story of a life told in impressionist patterns. Being Almodóvar, there’s the stuff of soap —adultery, tragedy, comas, symbolic storms— but conveyed with a kind of warm, human truth; emotions and situations wildly amplified to capture the overwhelming experience of being alive.

CAFÉ SOCIETY

Sometimes, your old pal Film Carew suffers from night terrors, waking up in fits and cold sweats, forever haunted by that unshakeable cinematic nightmare: the white Windsor text on black screen, the soft Dixie-jazz noodling away, and the words that chill my very blood... “Written and Directed by Woody Allen”.

The indefatigable creepy-uncle of American cinema just keeps on keeping on: the 80-year-old’s 47th film arriving in a year in which he also knocked out a shitty TV show. Café Society doesn’t just begin with Woody Allen clichés, but keeps them coming. The soft Dixie-jazz noodling is incessant, unforgiving; it feels like every second scene is set in a fucking jazz bar, and there’s even a moment in which Jeepers Creepers —one of history’s most noxious jingles— is gleefully sung.

The film itself is a nostalgic shrine to the gilded jazz age, a ’30s knees-up of old Hollywood hucksterism and New York knockabouts; this a silly game of dress-ups as gangsters and producers, molls and flappers. Allen likely sees the film as summoning a more glamorous time, but it’s a work of tedious nostalgia, the stock daydreams of an old man who loves jazz. Here, the past is a magical place where it’s not even cold on New Year’s Eve in New York, and where there’s not a negro in sight; a jazz club in the 1930s apparently a wild Caucasian fantasia.

As many Allen films do, it stars an actor submitting a veritable Woody impression in a grating leading-man role. Here, it’s Jesse Eisenberg, who arrives in Hollywood, a fresh-faced Bronx Jew freshly landed in Tinseltown, and falls for Kirsten Stewart’s modern woman; the film, as much as it’s ‘about’ anything, eventually settling into a bittersweet portrait of unrequited (well, semi-requited, really) love. This makes Café Society not just the 47th Woody Allen film, but the 3rd film in which Eisen-bro and K-Stew’ve played paramours; completing an unlikely trio with the downbeat ’80s-nostalgic teen-com Adventureland and obnoxious stoner-movie American Ultra.

Given Stewart’s amazing performances, this year, in Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper and Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, it’s a delight to see her on screen again, no matter the circumstances. Of course, being a Woody Allen film, there’s all kinds of delightful people in the cast: Parker Posey, Paul Schneider, Corey Stoll, Anna Camp, even Sheryl Lee. If you’re into Steve Carell and/or Blake Lively, well, hey, they’re here too. But assembling a starry cast is itself a Woody Allen cliché. Assembling a starry cast is never the problem. What’s wrong with Café Society is what’s wrong with pretty much every second film ol’ Woodsy cranks out: it’s utterly inessential.

Café Society is a piece of featherweight fluff filled with lazy evocations —using the word “jokes” would be inappropriate— of Old Hollywood actors; stars unseen on screen, whilst their names’re dropped with a tedious wink. “I’m gonna bring Judy Garland, you’ll love this kid!” says one Hollywood suit, at one point. At another, Eisenberg opines: “Life is a comedy, written by a sadistic comedy writer”; the line even more groaningly-awful in the movie than it is quoted here. The writing, as ever, feels lazy; the tossed-off quality of the screenplay made apparent by Allen’s own appearance as narrator, voice overs he evidently knocked out in an afternoon.

Woody Allen is a profitable enough brand that he can —and will— continue his film-a-year pace to the grave, but so rarely do the stories he choses to tell feel like they were demanding to be told. Café Society does little-to-nothing to justify its existence; offering only 96 minutes of mediocre familiarity for fans, and more fodder for the nightmares of long-suffering film critics.

JOE CINQUE’S CONSOLATION

For a True Crime film etched in sad, inscrutable tragedy, Joe Cinque’s Consolation seems more like a black comedy. Watch as a dickhead with a deathwish comes up with cockamamie schemes to kill herself, and then her boyfriend; then gets pissy and haughty when these worst-laid-plans fall apart. Helen Garner may’ve written the source text —2004’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story Of Death, Grief And The Law— as an artful, compassionate attempt to redress a failure of justice, but, here, the fallen saint of the title is a vessel of pure human blandeur; a terminally decent ‘nice guy’ played with all the charisma of a wooden board by the stiff, dull Joel Meyer.

In many ways, the title character is the human stand-in for its Canberran setting. The film is filled with references to Canberra’s famous boringness, and director Sotiris Dounoukos roams the (ever-curved, traffic-light-free) streets of the capital with a flat, disinterested camera; the rote suburbia turning ominous via Antonio Gamble’s foreboding, foreshadowing score. In turn, Joe Cinque’s Consolation is a film about the banality of evil, how horror can come dressed in the most quotidian costume.

Its protagonist isn’t its titular dude, but the girlfriend who did him in. Maggie Naouri plays her as hysterical and hapless, sinking into mental illness, body dysmorphia, and dissociation. Where the drama —and the (unintentional?) comedy— comes in are all those who enable her in her nefarious plans. Sacha Joseph plays the dutiful stooge who stands by her side: a beta-female who, put-upon and feckless, looks at a Naouri with a mixture of adoration and contempt; Joseph less friend than abused pet.

Joseph’s turn, too, seems weirdly distant, stilted; but it’s possibly suggestive of the greater directorial approach. Dounoukos removes the grief and law from Garner’s equation: beginning the film at the beginning of the Meyer and Naouri’s relationship, ending it with his death. Gone is the righteous anger at injustice; in its place is a dispassionate approach, all measured mid-shots and mannered performances. As the audience is invited to attend the morbid, poorly-attended dinner parties that were organised as theatrical farewells before Naouri’s failed suicide attempts, the likely gambit is that we’re being made to feel complicit in this death; all crimes the product of a society. It’s a noble cinematic notion, but one that doesn’t quite work. Even when its dying victim is vomiting blood on his deathbed, his girlfriend’s emergency call —a hysterical, nonsensical exchange with an unruffled elderly gent— is darkly funny; Joe Cinque’s Consolation tragedy that plays more like comedy.

ZERO DAYS

If Oliver Stone's recent populist biopic Snowden seemed like a tepid take on cyber-warfare —and the hypocrisy of American attitudes to secrecy— then Zero Days is a more timely, chilling portrait of these new frontlines of war. Here, Alex Gibney, the world's hardest-working documentarian, examines the story of the Stuxnet malware worm unleashed in 2010; charting where it came from, where it went, and what this means for contemporary conflict.

Whilst there's a static quality to its presentation —all talking heads and illustrative imagery; there only so many shots of animated binary floating in black space you can handle— Zero Days is positively electric with ideas. Those feeling like we're already dwelling in a dystopia will see their digital nightmare reflected: the fragility of the grid brought clearly to light by one act of cyber-sabotage.

Stuxnet was (allegedly!) the work of the CIA's in-house coders —Star Wars geeks and Aqua Teen bros— and Mossad counterparts. It was an “autonomous” worm designed to infiltrate the network of the Iranian nuclear facility in Natanz, and to cause "real world physical destruction" by playing with the settings on regulatory equipment. It's a sure harbinger of future ills: as we move from a contained internet towards an Internet Of Things, more and more staples of quotidian life are under threat to either sabotage or unintended calamity.

Zero Days, ultimately, becomes a thoughtful —and, at a time of astonishing Political Debate idiocy, pleasingly rational— discussion on cyber-warfare itself. Unlike its more corporeal forebears, this new frontier of conflict has no rules of engagement, no standards of conduct, no internationally-sanctioned treaties. Like drone warfare or mass-surveillance, it's another covert, classified All-American activity that has been, thus far, staged on US terms. But, Gibney rightly asks: did the Stuxnet worm open a can of worms? Given cyber attacks could target power grids, public transport, financial services —not to mention, soon enough, home appliances!— should we live in fear of our digitised life collapsing in an instant?