I probably shouldn't like 'The Neon Demon' but I kind of loved it

When Drive came out in 2011, it was love at first sight for me. The moody homage to movies like Thief and The Driver was a masterpiece in my opinion, the best movie of that year and I was psyched to see whatever its director, the cocky Nicolas Winding Refn, would do next.

His follow-up, the pretty much critically reviled Only God Forgives, was decidedly less accessible and yet I dug it, despite the fact that it was pretty indulgent and almost aggressively not audience-friendly.

By the time The Neon Demon rolled around I was starting to question my fandom.

Was Refn just a talented hack with a knack for sensuous visuals, or was he still a filmmaker worth following? After watching The Neon Demon, which will surely turn off most viewers as it has most critics, I must admit that I consider him and his work an irresistible guilty pleasure.

The movie is ostensibly a bleak satire of the fashion industry, but I don't think it has anything especially profound or original to say about that admittedly fascinating world. Instead, Refn has created a totally whacked out horror movie that could make for ideal midnight movie fare. A totally audacious and stunning-looking experiment in style over substance.

Veering wildly from black humor to gross-out gags, this is not a movie I could recommend to many people, in fact I can totally understand why a lot of audiences will/would hate it (if you despised Only God Forgives, steer clear). But I was on board with Refn's vision from the very first gorgeous frames.

He is aided tremendously by his mostly female, waif-like cast (and Keanu Reeves in a very good, out-of-character supporting role). Elle Fanning is a revelation. She builds on the promise she showed in Super 8, using her expressive face to play both naive sweetness and cunning sexuality. She is matched by Jena Malone, who nearly steals the movie with a performance that asks her to take some shocking risks that might humiliate a lesser actress.

The whole film is beyond absurd and if you're looking for something that makes a whole lot of narrative sense this isn't the movie for you. This is Refn doing a riff on Brian De Palma's aesthetic of pure cinema -- visual eye candy collides with Cliff Martinez's throbbing, erotic score -- to create a real dream like atmosphere that had me riveted.

The Neon Demon

Refn really likes to call attention to himself, he slathers the film with his name as prominently featured in the credits as his stars. Clearly he is a director interested in making a statement and being taken seriously, and I admire the fact that instead of making the Hollywood blockbusters he was surely offered after the critical success of Drive, he instead chose to let his freak flag fly and pursue his preoccupations.

His films are not kind to women to say the least, and a case could be made that this film traffics in misogyny, although I was impressed to see that his co-writers and cinematographer were all women. And his tendency to revel on particularly queasy violence has always been a little unsettling to me. But these are minor quibbles when I watch something that truly surprises me.

There are film I saw this year that I liked better but I sure had a lot of fun watching The Neon Demon, although I can't for the life of me figure out how he got a movie this bizarre financed! Say what you will about Refn and his films, he is one of the few directors I can think of right now who is cultivating a signature style (those dread-filled pregnant pauses!) and creating his own cinematic worlds.