The Neon Demon: 'depraved' fashion film has critics howling

Nicolas Winding Refn's latest film, The Neon Demon, has caused a stir at the Cannes Film Festival, prompting shouts of derision from some disgusted critics, but five star reviews from others.

Danish film director Refn, best known for violent noir dramas Drive and Only God Forgives, is no stranger to controversy, but his latest film, a horror thriller set in the modelling industry, has been one of his most polarising.

The Neon Demon stars Elle Fanning as a youthful starlet who comes to Los Angeles to launch her modelling career, but finds her unique combination of beauty, youth and innocence prompt dangerous jealousies and desires among the denizens of the nightmarish and predatory industry.

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Early reviews from a press screening in Cannes were blunt. One critic was heard yelling "trash!" at the screen in Spanish, while Kino-Zeit's Beatrice Behn immediately expressed her disgust on Twitter, calling the film an "absurd jerk-off lolita fantasy – motion sparkly neon dress with a side order of 90s music video aesthetics".

The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy calls it "a stultifyingly vapid, ponderously paced allegorical critique of the modelling world". It is "as stylish looking as the fashion industry's most expensive photo shoots", he admits, noting that this "languorous, vampiric send-up" of a field very close to movies "could become a guilty pleasure for jaded scenesters".

But McCarthy suspects the Amazon Studios release will "mostly be received with yawns, walk-outs and/or derision", pointing out that, in Cannes it was "far more lustily booed than any other film this year."

Owen Gleiberman in Variety calls Neon Demon "a baroquely kinky gross-out surrealist horror film". Gleiberman reports that anticipation for the screening was high at Cannes, as many hoped Refn "might just possess the operatic fearlessness to create a spellbinding horror film". 
It's certainly horror, says Gleiberman, and it isn't boring, he admits, but Refn is "so devoted to staying one step ahead of his audience", and pulling out the rug from under us, that he can't stick to anything. We end up with the horror conjured by the movie, but also "the slipshod horror of Nicolas Winding Refn's what-is-he-going-to-do-now? storytelling".

Nevertheless, adds Gleiberman, it will probably do OK at the box office, since horror films, "in the megaplex era of torture-porn-meets-J-horror-meets-the-kitchen-sink, don't really have to make sense to succeed".

Refn's film also had "a phalanx of applauders", notes Robbie Collin in the Daily Telegraph, who says he was one of them. He gives The Neon Demon five stars and calls it "a work of zero artistic compromise – a glittering, etherised nightmare" that only Refn could make.

Collin claims there is "significant pleasure" in swooning and retching your way through the film, while a prolonged sequence of lesbian necrophilia "ticks off that elusive final box on this year's on-screen depravity Cannes bingo card". He adds that a final Bunuel-inspired scene involving an eye-ball is so jaw-dropping "all you can do is howl or cheer".