THE NEON DEMON: Skin Deep

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Writers: Nicolas Winding Refn, Mary Laws, Polly Stenham
Cast: Elle Fanning, Jena Malone, Bella Heathcote, Abbey Lee, Keanu Reeves, Karl Glusman, Desmond Harrington, Christina Hendricks
Runtime: 118 mins.
2016

Nicolas Winding Refn broke into mainstream consciousness with 2011's Drive, the Ryan Gosling action vehicle. If you've never seen Drive, the phrase "Ryan Gosling action vehicle" probably conjures all sorts of expectations, few of which would sync up with the experience of watching Drive. Audiences were so distraught, in fact, that one Michigan woman brought a class action lawsuit against the film's distributor for releasing a deliberately misleading trailer, as the end product bore little resemblance to something in the vein of The Fast and the Furious. The critics, meanwhile, by and large heralded Drive as a brooding thriller, and a fascinating deconstruction of the masculine hero figure.

Two years later, Refn released Only God Forgives, and this time neither audiences nor critics were on board. Sitting at a 41% on Rotten Tomatoes, some excoriated the film for being laborious and impenetrable, while some lambasted it for being too on the nose. For my part, Only God Forgives was one of my favorite movies of 2013. It went even deeper down the rabbit hole of deconstructing Ryan Gosling's persona as part of its critique of the violence and perversion inherent in toxic masculinity. The central visual motif of the film is that of the hand: unclenched in supplication, clenched in violence. This commentary develops in glacier-slow sequences underpinned by Cliff Martinez's infectious score.

So it is to my absolute pleasure, and the distress of many others, that The Neon Demon is the perfect counterpart film to Only God Forgives. Whereas the latter follows violent gangs and the sex trade in Thailand to immerse us in toxic masculine culture, the former thrusts us into the Los Angeles modeling scene in order to put a lens on toxic femininity. The Neon Demon is Only God Forgives refracted through the prism of gender.

THE CONJURING 2: They Ain't 'Fraid of No Ghosts

Director: James Wan
Writers: Carey Hayes, Chad Hayes, James Wan, David Leslie Johnson
Cast: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Madison Wolfe, Frances O'Connor, Lauren Esposito, Benjamin Haigh, Patrick McAuley
Runtime: 134 mins.
2016

There are many things I love about the freshly franchised Conjuring movies. Foremost among them is the opening title card that features some ponderous purple prose detailing the "true" nature of this story, scrolling up the screen in enormous spidery yellow text, accompanied by music of ill portent. If the events as portrayed were even vaguely "true," this film would likely be in bad taste, but luckily the movie has no compunctions about letting us know early and often that there is not a whiff of accuracy to what you're seeing onscreen. The film uses its "based on actual events" as schlocky window dressing, a mood-setting gesture no more accurate than "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." This is to our tremendous advantage; instead of making some self-serious loosely-biographical slog, we have been treated to a couple of the most delightfully scary haunted house stories to ever grace the genre.

Wan's sequel kicks off with a statement of intent. Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren are in the midst of investigating the haunting at Amityville, one of the most heavily mined source materials in paranormal history. Lorraine goes on a little spirit walk that involves stepping into the shoes of the possessed killer, at which point she is confronted with a gruesome premonition about the future of her and her husband. This is not one of the better scenes of the film, but setting the opening stinger in Amityville effectively establishes two important points: 1) Wan is not afraid to upstage his horror-making brethren, and 2) This particular Conjuring chapter will have far more of a focus on the ghostbusting duo than the last.

THE LOBSTER: Love in the Time of Anomie

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Writers: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Filippou
Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Lea Seydoux, John C. Reilly, Ben Whishaw, Jessica Barden, Ariane Labed, Angeliki Papoulia
Runtime: 119 mins.
2016

The Lobster follows protagonist David (Colin Farrell) through his stay at The Hotel, a resort with one central purpose: to help its tenants find love and stable relationships with each other. Those who fail to find a partner by the end of their stay will be turned into an animal of their choosing. Life at the resort is rigorously structured, from the No Masturbation rule, to the strict meal and dance times, to the staged presentations about the superiority of couplehood, to the daily morning routine that involves a maid grinding on the male tenants' laps until they become hard--but not a moment longer. Everything about the place is meant to maximize the romantic desire and viability of its occupants; everything except the hunting of the Loners, that is.

Every day the tenants get on a bus with tranquilizer rifles in hand and head into the woods to hunt radicals who have defected from The Hotel and chosen an aggressively single lifestyle together. If you capture a Loner, one day is added to the duration of your stay. At first David participates clumsily in the hunt, but as his time runs out his relationship with the Loners becomes more complex.

If you were to go into The Lobster expecting some sort of sci-fi thriller, you would be mistaken. If you were to go in expecting a romantic comedy of sorts, you would also be mistaken. In fact, if you were to go into this movie expecting anything in particular, there's a significant chance of you walking away feeling frustrated or unsatisfied. The Lobster is so singular in its presentation that it doesn't fit into any boxes we typically stuff movies into. The closest comparison I can draw is that it is something like an extremely perverse version of a Wes Anderson movie, but even that fails at capturing what The Lobster is up to.