What a silly, empty, preposterous little film. Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon takes itself far too seriously for any of its camp to be accepted as anything other than camp. And that's the problem: it thinks it's some big statement about...something. But it comes off as a vaguely related string of absurd, hyper-stylized, hyper-sexualized images. It's all surface; there's nothing beneath Refn's sterilized veneers. Oh wait, there might be: Refn's own twisted, pedophilic desires to see a 16-year old character abused, assaulted, and finally broken. The final 20 minutes collapses into a miasma of crazy symbolism that probably only symbolizes anything in Refn's own head. Why was there a scene where a woman masturbates with a corpse in a morgue? Why did that one model regurgitate an eyeball so the other could eat it? I'm sure there must be answers to these questions, but Refn failed to interest me in them. Still, this was a pretty film. I wish more directors were as willing to embrace color for its own sake.
4/10
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