The Neon Demon: Winding Refn Gets Booed In Cannes AGAIN
Is this even more polarizing that Only God Forgives?
After polarizing audiences at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 with Only God Forgives, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn is facing a fresh round of controversy following the debut of his latest movie, The Neon Demon.
A horror movie centering around the fashion world, The Neon Demon premiered at the festival and was met with booing from some of the critics present. Others defended the film, describing it as an effective, dreamlike horror movie, proving once again that Refn is a director capable of provoking impassioned reactions from his audience, both positive and negative.
Refn is unlikely to be phased by the split reactions to the film - in response to the same divisive reaction to Only God Forgives in an interview with IndieWire, the director said, "I only like it when people love it or hate it."
The Telegraph ran an extremely favourable review, awarding the film 5 stars and describing it as imbuing "a heady cocktail from a number of sources here: the lip-licking Italian horror genre giallo, with its sticky blood and creaking leather accoutrements, the tree-perched lunacy of the Chilean surrealist (and Refns long-standing mentor) Alejandro Jodorowsky."
Little White Lies were equally vocal in their support for the film, also awarding it 5 stars in their review.
Refns latest and best, The Neon Demon, is the culmination of his decades-long fascination with human nature in its darkest, most destructive form. It is predictably, reliably a gorgeous, grisly work which holds a (vanity) mirror up to modern societys corroded moral core.
The Guardian were less enthusiastic, decrying the lack of substance and describing it as "fantastically preposterous and objectionable, but expertly varnished with a sheen of pure evil."
Exasperating though this film can be, Refn shows real visual style and a willingness to protract wordless scenes into a nightmarish state beyond narrative ... I have to say that it does not have the power of his earlier movies, the potency/absurdity balance is a little off, and unlike his much-mocked and little-understood Only God Forgives it does not satisfyingly stay the course with its central character, and is in fact almost uninterested in what Fanning has to offer as a performer.
Harsher condemnation for The Neon Demon came from The Hollywood Reporter, who open their review by describing it as "a stultifyingly vapid, ponderously paced allegorical critique of the modelling world whose seethingly jealous inhabitants cant wait to literally chew each other up and spit each other out."
Perhaps the harshest judgement of all for The Neon Demon came from Kino-Zeit's Beatrice Behn, who called Refn's latest an "absurd jerk-off lolita fantasy in a slow-motion sparkly neon dress with a side order of 90s music video aesthetics".
A comment from a favourable review from The Wrap neatly encapsulates the reactions to The Neon Demon and Refn's place in contemporary filmmaking:
Is he a poet, a provocateur, a poser? An artist who expertly plays with genre, a stylish sickie besotted of his own excesses or an auteur who belongs in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where his film The Neon Demon had its first press screening on Thursday night?
If you want to watch The Neon Demon and judge for yourself, the film is scheduled for release on June 26th 2016.