The Neon Demon (2016)

Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon arrives in Los Angeles with a sixteen-year-old model named Jesse and a thesis about beauty, which it pursues with the patience of a perfume advertisement and the manners of a slaughterhouse. The cast is led by women, an ensemble of models, makeup artists, and agency handlers, though the faces on screen remain almost uniformly white. Any gesture toward inclusive representation was declined at the door. The film's treatment of same-sex desire lands in stranger territory still: Ruby's advances toward Jesse and her later encounter with a corpse in the morgue are staged as predation and pathology, not affirmation, which leaves that box conspicuously unchecked.

There is a feminist argument buried in the premise, an all-female horror about the machinery that consumes young women for their youth. The camera undermines it. Refn photographs his lead the way the industry he condemns photographs her, lingering on surfaces, and the women who surround her become monsters with appetites. Gigi vomits an eyeball. Sarah eats it. The film's interest in the body is anatomical, horror of the flesh instead of acceptance of it, and its swipe at the fashion business reads as atmosphere, an allegory of appetite without an economic argument attached.

The remaining categories are quiet. Race goes unmentioned. The climate does not appear. Nobody is diagnosed. History is not revised. And for a film with this much to say about beauty, it says almost none of it out loud, preferring neon, blood, and the occasional knife. The sermon is delivered in images, which is its only real courtesy. A gorgeous, airless provocation that confuses cruelty with insight.