The Neon Demon is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, who’s such a fucking auteur that he embossed his initials onto the opening credits, like Perry Como did with his slippers. N-W-R, in cascading script. He might as well have also branded the letters on his actors’ asses, and our eyeballs.

Refn is a Danish director best-known in America for Drive (2011). That film made an impressive impact despite a story that abandoned a promising setup to become a cutlery-enhanced bloodbath. Refn himself wrote the Neon Demon story — which was efficient, since he clearly didn’t want to bother with too much of it.

The Neon Demon takes place in an L.A. fashion industry that consists in its entirety of three models, two photographers, one makeup artist, and some occasionally-glimpsed extras. One of the three models is 16-year-old Jesse (Elle Fanning), who arrives in town solo and moves into a sketchy motel run by a wolfish guy named Hank (Keanu Reeves).

She makes friends in Dean (Karl Glusman), an earnest photographer; and Ruby (Jena Malone), a makeup artist who introduces her to the other two models in town, Gigi (Bella Heathcote) and Sarah (Abbey Lee). Those two decide that Jesse’s button nose and sub-legal age constitute an existential threat to their livelihood, and shit gets real.

Except that it doesn’t get real at all. The Neon Demon is a cautionary tale about our appearance-obsessed culture in the same way that Lifeboat is a cautionary tale about maritime safety: the premise is just an excuse to set these characters in opposition to one another. For Hitchcock, that meant psychological thrills; for Refn, it means monochromatic mayhem.

Among the movie’s many outrageous images is one of a girl being choked by a knife, which is an apt metaphor for Refn’s filmmaking style. He’s so entranced with his own ability to shock that he sacrifices the characters we’re supposed to be shocked by, or on behalf of. The Neon Demon is about symbols, not people; like Drive, it works best when Refn abandons the near-whispered dialogue for throbbing beats and lets the film just be a music video.

As the climactic act of violence approached, I did in fact find myself struck with horror — not horror about what might happen to young Jesse, avatar of innocence, but horror that the movie was going to end before it really began, before anything might happen to actually engage any part of the brain that lies ahead of the visual cortex.

In an early scene, Jesse’s taken to a male photographer who clears the set, commands her to strip naked, slathers her with gold paint, and clicks away while the teenager stands there looking mortified. When Ruby asks her how it went, Jesse replies that it went just great. Is this an implicit self-critique, or an argument that anything’s worth it as long as you get the shot? Refn doesn’t even seem to care; he just hustles his fresh-faced starlet along to her next degradation.

– Jay Gabler