Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

Dan Gilroy's Velvet Buzzsaw arrives as a glossy Los Angeles satire in which the art market's most venal participants are picked off by the very paintings they hope to flip. The premise is elegantly simple. A dead recluse's canvases, painted with blood, find their way into the hands of dealers, critics, and collectors, and then those hands are severed, those necks are broken, those buzz-saw tattoos begin to spin. The film's contempt for commerce is total and unembarrassed. Every character who confuses a price tag with a soul is dispatched with mechanical cheer, and the moral is not subtle. Art should not be a commodity. The market is a slaughterhouse. It says so with a monkey mechanic and a rampaging robot.

The cast is unusually diverse for a Netflix genre exercise, with Zawe Ashton and Daveed Diggs occupying central roles, though the film never pauses to congratulate itself on the fact. Race is simply not a subject here. Jake Gyllenhaal's critic, Morf Vandewalt, is written as sexually fluid, drifting from his boyfriend Ed into an affair with Josephina, a choice the director has discussed openly. The women, Rhodora, Gretchen, and Josephina, hold genuine power and exercise it ruthlessly, but the screenplay treats their ambition as one more symptom of a diseased ecosystem, not as a thesis about gender. Everyone is awful. That is the point.

Ultimately the film operates in the register of genre mayhem. It has a thesis about art and money, and it delivers that thesis through severed limbs and jump scares instead of speeches, which spares us the sermon. The result is uneven, occasionally clumsy, and quite pleased with its own cynicism. Still, there is something bracing about a film that lets a robotic art installation strangle a critic and calls it justice. The canvas here is broad. The brushwork is crude. And the buyer should beware.