Rancid, pretentious and downright creepy

KLAXON alert: I fear The Neon Demon may win art-house award nominations. Which won’t change the fact that it is rancid, voyeuristic, pretentious exploitation, from a director, Nicolas Winding Refn, who can’t decide whether he’s the new Hitchcock or Helmut Newton on a bondage video-shoot for Vivienne Westwood in 1976.

His theme is women and their supposed preoccupation with extreme beauty. It’s set in Los Angeles, where a virginal 16-yearold orphan, Jesse (Elle Fanning, doe-eyed fairytale princess, pictured) arrives hoping for a modelling career.

She poses first for a wannabe photographer as a corpse in Pierrot make-up. Acquiring an agent she takes the eye of a top photographer ( Desmond Harrington) who strips her naked and covers her — slowly, by hand — in gold paint. Her motel landlord (Keanu Reeves, bravely playing the bad guy) is not only a violent rapist, but wholly unsympathetic when a live puma gets into her bedroom. But the film’s main point is how horrid women are. The older models hate Jesse, one breaking a mirror so as to cut open her hand and suck her fresh young blood.

Ruby (Jena Malone) is a chic make-up artist who also works on corpses, and pre- tends friendship. A doomy score, endless lingering shots of bloodstained female flanks, and the infuriatingly arch artistic framing of every shot, all serve the director’s love affair with expressionless women in PVC bondage gear. Elle Fanning makes a brave stab at being a human girl, but by the end of the first hour has become chiefly a prop for arty shots. Eventually left alone in a sinister mansion Jesse’s first thought is to put on a ballgown and balance on the end of the diving board intoning: ‘Women would kill to look like this. They carve and stuff and inject themselves hoping one day they’ll

look like a second-rate version of me.’ So that’s us told. Creepy Mr Refn, on the other hand, just wants fancy lighting, overdressed fashion, knives, blood, smooth white thighs and cannibalism.

He speaks of female ‘empowerment’, and hired two women co-writers, including Britain’s own glum Polly Stenham: yet somehow he fails to convince me of his feminism. But there’ll be wise nods about ‘witty subversion of the horror genre’ and the fashion industry (for which Refn makes promos).

Others will just relish the sadism, or get bored. Let me helpfully tell you that the lesbian necrophilia comes 95 minutes in, and that you don’t get to the vomited eyeball till two gruelling hours are up.

Tactless, if kindly meant, the film company offered the critics mini scotch eggs before the screening.