The Neon Demon is attractive and echoingly empty

Nicolas Winding Refn directed “Drive” and “Only God Forgives”, two films of differing quality (the first is best) that share a stylishly violent sensibility.

When Fanning heard that Refn, whom see calls “the king of masculinity, blood and violence”, was doing a film about fashion in Los Angeles and a teenage girl was the lead, she wanted to be in it even before reading the script.

The future, for Refn, is narcissism, which he dramatizes in “Neon Demon”.

“We realized, as we were filming, who the Neon Demon was”. Ruby (Jena Malone), the make-up artist she meets at a photo shoot, recognizes it. Certainly, the icy models Ruby introduces her to (Bella Heathcote and Abbey Lee) recognize it. So do the photographers and designers and everyone else with whom Jesse comes into contact.

The day after Elle Fanning walked in her high school graduation ceremony at Walt Disney Concert Hall, she walked the red carpet for her new movie, “The Neon Demon”, opening June 24. It’s a reaction, after all.

On speaking to her co-star model Abby Lee Kershaw…

The Neon Demon is also Refn’s play on the Italian giallo tradition, specifically Dario Argento’s benchmark horror film Suspiria, which also uses retina-searing colors to articulate the hostilities within a profession that demands perfection oft he female form. “She was cool with it, so I said let’s make this movie”, he says. V102 honors the actress’ role in the Cannes breakout film The Neon Demon, a psychological thriller about an aspiring model and the “darker side” of the industry.

Underage and green, Jesse moves from meeting to meeting like a glitter-bombed deer in headlights, though for how naive she acts, Fanning gives her a knowing quality: She tells anybody who’ll listen that she knows she’s pretty, and when a dead-eyed A-list photographer (Desmond Harrington) has her get naked and covers her in gold paint, she doesn’t put up a fight. For most of the film’s running time it doesn’t even appear that this is headed in the horror direction, but the final act is a doozy and not all that predictable.

Yet the men in the movie are for the most part benign when compared to the women. Like her Demon character Jesse, Fanning herself moved to Los Angeles at a young age after her sister’s success as a child star-though her time in glitzy glam land of Southern California has been nothing like the ruthless brutality her character experiences. It’s probably that she is meant to be the only thing truly real here – well, besides Reeves’ motel manager, who is genuine at the opposite end of the decency spectrum. “People say you should love yourself and say you’re lovely, but then it’s crossing that line into narcissism”. I don’t know if it’s being a woman, but you’re taught not to answer that.