Opiniões dos críticos

Refn offers a prepacked metaphor, supplemented with an astrological index that can help us in ‘decoding' our product – even before the slightest attempt at interpretation is waged. By way of an absurd faith in difference, however, a ceaseless repetition of the Same ensues: an alternation which serves to camouflage a true sense of change. The director can but excel in the reproduction of his personal obsessions. Not without surprise, his films are as ephemeral as the world they claim to depict.

That it was only a dream doesn't eradicate the distaste of the scene in which Reeves mimes a blowjob with a hunting knife on sleeping teen Elle Fanning. That it wasn't even the most disgusting part of the always disgusting Nicolas Winding Refn's disgusting movie says a lot about this film's depths of smug depravity.

The real horror of this thoroughly polished turd lies not in the acts of envy-fueled girl-on-girl violence or its many prettily oozing pools of blood but the idea that anyone might believe its events are derived from actual human feeling rather than layer upon layer of stylish nothing.

On paper, The Neon Demon is little more than a violent episode of Melrose Place, but the script doesn't convey the life that Refn brings to this world. What critics of The Neon Demon appear to have missed is the intense loneliness of the film. Refn lingers with longing not just on the supple breasts and asses of his struggling fashion-model characters, but also on their eyes, which are empty in a fashion that connotes loss of soul rather than superficiality.

Boasting color that would make Mario Bava blush and proffering hilariously conceited exchanges that oscillate between farce and bone-dry awkwardness, each successive scene loudly announces Refn's turn of the screw. Refn finds the fabric of hidden cultural demons, and not the sorts of spirits that can be dismissed by an exorcist.

One of the master stylists of today's post-filmic motion pictures, Refn's images are as clean as his characters are fetid, are as sterile as his material is filthy, creating a world of internal contradiction, a world exploding in replication, in falseness, in artificial poses, artificial clothing, and artificial relationships... In THE NEON DEMON, his finest film to date, he reaches new extremes of precision and expertly subtle dissection.

...It would be nice to report that all of the visual gamesmanship in The Neon Demon is equally adroit, but as in Refn's previous films—or at least the string of them starting with Valhalla Rising—there is a problem with the relationship of form to content. The question is whether Refn's desire to indulge his "visionary" side detracts from the work rather than successfully defining it.

Color me shocked that my favorite recent movie is a Nicolas Winding Refn joint. Drive and Only God Forgives made me want to claw my eyes out (my Ryan Gosling allergy certainly didn't help matters), whereas I felt like my every sense was giddily expanding while watching this vacuous and depraved take on the vacuous and depraved LA modeling scene. Refn hasn't changed; he's just found a milieu that suits his sumptuous nihilism.

Refn's is clearly a film not be reflected upon, nor did he exercise any brain waves while making it. But having said that, for this two-hour vacation into an ideology-free zone I had a blast, as Refn has his vomit and eats it too. (Lesbian necrophilia! Chromatic ejacluation! To quote an anonymous Spanish-speaking heckler, "Puta mierda!")

The film offers up the type of sensual feast cinematic hedonists have come to expect from the director's work—but it also proves that purely pretty things aren't sustainably interesting... It's not until we arrive at the third act that the film finally nails the tone Refn has been striving for... Here, the monstrosities of beauty are fully revealed in an orgiastic display of flesh, blood, and glittery eye shadow—it's just a shame we didn't get there sooner.

There is no reality check for the girls in Refn's film, and the director unsurprisingly over-elaborates this sentiment. Yet at the same time, he mocks it, as Jesse becomes incredibly pompous for her young age and relative inexperience. The consequences of her vanity and of others' envy reach such extremes that Refn cannot help but ridicule them, however bloody they may be.

It matches exotic, voluptuary images to commonplace themes: the idea that the marketplace of female beauty encourages or even demands predatory behavior, and is peopled by spiritual cripples. The film lives or dies on its ability to seduce the viewer into an awed trance state with sheer technique, but the technique is by intention glossy and frictionless, and unable to get a handle, I found myself continually slipping into a restless indifference.