The Neon Demon

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

2016 / 117min / DCP

Newly orphaned under mysterious circumstances, dewy, callow 16-year-old ingenue Jesse (Elle Fanning) relocates from smalltown Georgia to Los Angeles, where she quickly finds herself at the center of envious, plastic surgery–sculpted industry veterans (Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee), law-skirting fashion agents, and assorted showbiz lechers, her existence gradually subsumed in a maelstrom of increasingly unhinged, hallucinatory imagery that’s shot with bloody brio by DP Natasha Braier. “A modern fairytale of beauty as a beast, a horror-inflected, high-fashion fable… A carefully choreographed carnival of voyeurism in which corruptible beauty is ‘the only thing’ and every look comes with daggers.” —The Guardian