Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Elle Fanning, Karl Glusman, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, Desmond Harrington, Christina Hendricks, Keanu Reeves, Charles Baker, Jamie Clayton.

The world of modelling and fashion is one in which dreams are made but in which nightmares for many come true. Hedonistic, rebellious and cut throat, someone somewhere will want to kill you just for being thinner and younger than them. In a more gruesome reality than in which famed science fiction spectacular Logan’s Run could muster, that to be over twenty is to be written off by the vogue society, demons will always come home to rule the roost.

Nicolas Winding Refn’s film focuses primarily on newcomer Jesse and the attention she receives, the jealousy she faces, on her way to her dream job. The Neon Demon though is no roughhouse exposé of the fashion world, this is brutal, charming, wolf like, anarchistic artistic and one in which you cannot keep your eyes from exploring, even with the darkness that descends pretty quickly as the film progresses to its insane ending.

This is not a nice film, it is stunning in its approach, the barriers it smashes down on screen is graphic but it retains the sense of ironic behaviour than in another time would have it routinely derided, it is brave, bold and interesting, slightly off its own head but nice it cannot be. The scenes of Sapphic necrophilia and suggested cannibalism is enough to have you retching in sympathy, in anguish at the way human behaviour can stoop to such levels of depravity.

If you can bypass the last ten minutes or so, if you can stare at the floor, to the ceiling, anywhere but on screen then it is to the betterment of the film; however if you are a purist who believes that art is king then watch and write a thesis on it, for surely no film for the rest of the year will go down a path so narrow.

With Elle Fanning giving a very dramatic performance as Jesse, the film plays out as if it attached to barrels of gun powder, the spark, the explosion coming from Jene Malone’s Ruby, the mortician assistant and cover girl make-up artist who rapidly takes over the cinema screen as if she held the only matches in which to blow the audience out of their boots and their souls.

A disturbing work of art, brutal, powerful, outrageous, The Neon Demon is a shock waiting to happen.

Ian D. Hall