Critics reviews

Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux is a boldly stylised and intellectually ambitious film about pop music.

The film is an onslaught, sometimes silly, sometimes profound, but always riveting and emotional, and dazzlingly sure of itself.

At times, including in the bloody opener, Corbet seems to be following the lead of the art-film auteur Michael Haneke, whose explorations of mediated violence can skew sadistic. By the time “Vox Lux” ends, it’s clear that Corbet has his own ideas; he’s still finding his way but, at 30, he is already a dynamic filmmaker.

With its extremes of experience and banal slightness of content, Brady Corbet’s rock-world melodrama “Vox Lux,” portentously labelled “A Twenty-First Century Portrait,” is an exemplary latter-day entry in the realm of cinematic camp.

That treacherous slogan “When they go low, we go high” epitomizes the deliberately cynical dishonesty of our era, but filmmaker Brady Corbet is ambitious in a forthright way — unmatched by any other American moviemaker. His new movie, Vox Lux: A Twenty-First Century Portrait, resists cynicism with grand artistic and philosophical conceits.

Lol Crawley’s analog cinematography captures the cold, subdued elements of mania just as lucidly as it swirls around the new millennium’s neo-baroque pageantry, with Vox Lux madly alternating between repressed melancholy and the near absurdity of its coupling of mass murder and pop music.

Nobody will accuse Corbet of having too few ideas, or overly familiar ones, or too bashful an approach to them. His aesthetics and his story choices vacillate among the resplendent, the murky, and the willfully tacky. . . . These swings make it all the more remarkable that Vox Lux finally feels both touching and revealing, about its people as well as their epoch.

Vox Lux‘s image of a popstar in decline is a concise one, but it’s also unmistakably stale. Just about the only truly interesting insights that Corbet gives us into Celeste’s behavior are confined to Dafoe’s narration, such as an off-handed reference to a Mel Gibson-esque drunken, racist meltdown.

There is an argument that depicting the horror of current events helps make them seem real for the audience, but it’s fair to say there’s already plenty of anxiety and awareness of them among said audience. . . . I see no smart argument about our toxic culture being made in this sequence, only an example of this very culture’s tendency to generate shock and thrills.

Like its main character, pop singer Celeste (Natalie Portman), it responds to the social tragedies of the past 20 years with a lyrical vision that speaks through poetry rather than prose.

Corbet steers away from glamorising the notion of suffering for one’s art, ensuring that his sharp social satire remains on firm moral ground.

If you can let pass that Corbet exploits not only school shootings but also civilian massacres and even 9/11, then this trashy exposé dressed up as a high-art epic is a veritable blast.