The Neon Demon 2016 begs for a psycho-sexual analysis

  Blender Dumbass
October 15, 2025

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Nicolas Winding Refn seems to be making only cult-classics. His 2011 Drive was a moderate box office success. But a banger of a cult-classic later on, as people understood that it is not a mere action film. Then he made Only God Forgives. A strange psycho-sexual movie where the plot lives in the crack-space between reality and dream-land. The film got misunderstood and barely made its money back. Yet those people who like it, like it very much. And then he made a straight box-office disaster The Neon Demon that made only half of its ( rather small $7.5 million ) budget back. Yet it is seems like it's the kind of movie that just begs for a deep analysis.

I watched The Neon Demon maybe over 10 times already. Something about Refn's movies, especially those kind of strange movies, drawn me in over and over. I didn't even know if I need to re-watch the film for this review. I did re-watch it. And I'm still as confused about it as I always was.

Thematically it is a sister film to Coralie Fargeat's 2024 sensation The Substance. Both are horror films about the show-business. Both explore the concepts of ageism. In The Substance we have an aging star, thrown away for being "too old". And in The Neon Demon we have a young girl who everybody envies because she is "too young".

The main character in The Neon Demon is a 16 year old girls Jesse, portrayed by Elle Fanning. The whole concept of the movie holds on the fact that she is the most beautiful person in the entire universe. Which is a tough task to portray. Literally every little imperfection about the actor will be judged, if the film claims some outlandish thing like this. Fanning is immensely pretty. And Refn did a good casting decision with her. Is she the prettiest person ever? Nobody is. Maybe that is sort of the point. Sometimes you have shots where this idealized girl is not "perfect". Which means the movie requires a bit of imagination. Frankly I doubt a perfect casting for this role even exists. Fanning is like 90% there. The other 10% needs to be done by the audience to make the movie work.

I'm going to spoil the plot of the whole movie. So please, if you haven't seen it, go and watch it now. I kind of need to give you context about what's going on to even attempt to make a psycho-sexual analysis of it.

So we start the movie with Jesse dead. Her throat is cut. And there is a lot of blood everywhere. Yet she is lit with the prettiest of lights. And this Dean guy ( Karl Glusman ) is taking pictures of her. We almost immediately understand that this blood is makeup and Jesse is just a model on the blood-themed photo-shoot. Behind the scenes Jesse is approached by Ruby ( Jena Malone ) who helps her to wash off the blood and later takes Jesse to a party where they meet Gigi ( Bella Heathcote ) and Sarah ( Abbey Lee ). Two models working in the industry.

On the party everybody is already paying a bit too much attention to Jesse. And we get a confrontation in the toilet where Sarah bluntly asks her "Who are you fucking?". Which creates an awkward tension, where Jesse unconvincingly tries to lie that she isn't a virgin.

Next morning she comes to the modeling agency where a producer Roberta Hoffman ( Christina Hendricks ) says Jesse that she is good. And that she can be great in the industry. But she needs to tell everyone that she is 19. The industry wants her to lie about her age, to get away from legal trouble. Which means that a lot of what they will produce will be technically child-porn. But since she says she is 19, nobody will know or care.

Which is what happens rather immediately. After a brief date with the Dean character, who tries to run away from Jesse, when he learns she is underage. And after Jesse discovers a panther in her room in a motel she is staying in. Which creates a problem with the motel's manager. She is doing a photo-shoot with Jack McCarther ( Desmond Harrington ) who looks at her and immediately decides that it is a closed-set, because he wants to shoot her naked. The scene is very tense, because Jesse thinks that he might try to rape her or something. Closed-set means that they are left alone. But he appears to be a professional. Still, technically speaking, Jack just made ( unknowingly ) child-porn images.

Judy ( the girl that took Jesse to the party ) talks to the other two models ( Gigi and Sarah ) about Jesse and how absolutely perfect she is. And those two models start to go absolutely insane with their jealousy. Then the jealousy is amplified when Jesse nails an audition for a fashion show, by just being there. The show runner Robert Sarno ( Alessandro Nivola ) almost cums in his pants as soon as he sees Jesse. While he didn't give a flying fuck about Sarah. This is where Sarah breaks a mirror out of anger, which Jesse is getting bruised by. And instead of helping her Sarah tries to suck the blood out of Jesse's wound.

Dean tries to help Jesse both with the wound and with the money she owes the manager of the motel. This manager is played by Keanu Reeves. And he appears to be this tough as fuck rapist guy. He even suggests Dead to stop wasting his time on Jesse ( that probably will not give him ) and instead go to the other room, of a 13 year old run-away girl. He says she is "real lolita shit".

Then at the show itself, where Robert Sarno puts Jesse as the centerpiece ( to the envy of Gigi, who is also present ) we get a strange sequence. You can say it is a hallucination sequence. But I think the movie is just trying to use some sort of symbolism to convey some sort of meaning. Basically Jesse meets The Neon Demon which is like a neon set of 3 triangles forming a larger triangle. The 2 triangles at the top could be seen as the eyes. And the triangle at the bottom could be seen as the mouth.

This Neon Demon changes Jesse's character. This is her arc, so to speak. Before that she knew that she is somewhat pretty, but she was an unsure of herself child. Now she is the bitch. Now she knows everyone wants a piece of her.

After the show she invites Dean to sit with Robert, Gigi and another model at a restaurant. There Robert confronts Dean about beauty. He claims that beauty ( especially real one, not manufactured, which makes Gigi mad, because she did plastic surgery to look how she looks )... that beauty is the only thing that matters. Dean obviously tries to argue that whats inside matters more. And so Robert beats Dean with a stupidly intense argument: "If she wasn't beautiful, you wouldn't even stopped to look".

That leads to Dean and Jesse breaking apart. And to Jesse being alone in her motel room at night. With the horny Keanu Reeves character trying to break into her room to knife-rape her into her mouth. I mean, she has a dream where the manager comes in and puts a knife down her throat. Kind of in a reference to a shot in The Driver by Walter Hill. This leads her to locking her, already kind of broken, door, even harder, so he couldn't get it. He actually tries to get into her room. But gives up and goes into that other room with the 13 year old "real lolita" runaway girl. Jesse hears how he rapes her, so she calls Ruby for help. And Ruby invites her to sleep at her place.

Ruby is house-sitting a huge mansion. Now, is she actually house-sitting? Hard to know. Her character is kind of fucked up. And she could be lying. At her house Ruby tries to have sex with Jesse in a very awkward moment. Where Jesse reveals to her that she is a virgin. After a moment of absolute awkwardness, Ruby tries again, this time to rape Jesse. Which leads to them having a little fight.

After that Ruby, working her makeup job at a local morgue... She prepares the dead bodies for their burial ceremony, by making their dead faces look a bit more alive... So she is working on a corpse of this girl that appears to be kind of young. And that corpse reminds her of Jesse. So she locks the door and proceeds to rape the corpse while fantasizing about Jesse. We get like a borderline pornographic scene.

Later Ruby, Gigi and Sarah confront Jesse in the mansion. They chase her down and kill her. We get a very tense chasing scene. And then a strangely psycho-sexual, almost pornographic shower scene, where Ruby ( dirty in blood ) watches Gigi and Sarah take a shower together, to wash off blood.

Then at a photo-shoot in the morning Gigi starts feeling sick and she pukes out an eye. Jesse's eye. We learn that they didn't just kill her, but also cannibalized her. Gigi kills herself unable to take what she did. While Sarah takes the eye from the floor and eats it herself. The end.

If you didn't understand why I think this movie begs for a psycho-sexual analysis, I hope you understand it now. But I think this is not enough. We have to look at a broader filmography of the director, for psycho-sexual clues. And even maybe we should look at his personal life.

I didn't see all films by Refn, mainly because a good chunk of them are Danish. Refn's father Anders Refn is a Danish filmmaker himself who mostly helps bigger filmmakers do their movies. He is either doing editing or assisting. A lot of the films Anders Refn assisted or edited are Lars Von Trier movies, who you know is another Danish filmmaker begging for a psycho-sexual analysis.

Now, Nicolas Winding Refn and Von Trier seem to have a sort of personal-life problem with one another. Von Trier seems to say that Refn is "a good kid", dismissing any biff between the two. But Refn seems to be rather keen of shitting of Von Trier. For example when Von Trier did Nymphomaniac ( Anders Refn was an assistance director on it ) Nicolas Winding Refn specifically shitted on the whole concept of the movie, saying that if he wanted to see a porno film he would go and watch a porno film. While Refn himself appears to be a pornographer. In the interviews about The Neon Demon he often talks about the morgue scene and calls himself a "pornographer" when describing how he directed it. This seems like, while Refn wants to do similar kinds of movies to Von Trier, there is something that happened between the two in real life, which makes him dislike Von Trier a lot.

If you look at Refn's filmography, there is one theme that seems to creep into most of his movies. In Bronson at one point, the main character is trying to kill, who he believes to be a pedophile. In Only God Forgives the brother of the main character walks at night in search to "fuck a 14 year old". And then their mother is revealed to be a pedophile herself. The main dramatic drive of the film, appears to be the main character's envy of his brother. Because his mom had more sex with the brother. In Too Old To Die Young the main irony of the show is about the main character being a police officer who is dating an underage girl. While also going on a rampage of murdering perverts. Specifically pedophiles. Even his remake of The Driver adds a kid into the picture, which motivates the main character.

I wander what biff Refn has with Von Trier? Now I gonna take a theory out of the toilet, after it fell from my theorizing ass... It could be theorized that Von Trier had an affair with Refn when Refn was a little kid. That would explain the biff they have and that would explain the obsession with the subject-matter in his movies. Von Trier seems like a kind of character that could be involved in something like this. Lars was a child actor as a kid. Which, we know, can fuck a person up a bit. But he was also growing up in a nudism camp where sex was free. And he later discovered that his dad was German ( probably a Nazi ) while his mom is Jewish. Which tore him apart psychologically. So Von Trier is a hell of a depressed, sex addict type character, that is depressed to such an extent, he literally sees no logic in ethics.

This same Von Trier constantly uses kids in his films in situations specifically designed to fuck the audience up psychologically. His 2018 film The House That Jack Build ( that personally broke me psychologically ) has a scene where the main character, to impress Satan, kills little kids in cold blood. Yet Satan thinks that it was pathetic, because this doesn't even constitute a little tiny bit of the most evil shit he knows about. Basically the film argues that even killing kids is not that bad after all.

So this Von Trier guy meets Refn when Refn is a kid and probably fucks him up a bit. I don't know if they had a full on relationship, of if Von Trier raped Refn, or if Von Trier did something minor, like showing his dick to Refn, or if there was nothing at all. Like I'm still just theorizing this and there probably will never be an answer. But there could be something there. At the very least growing up with Von Trier around might have simply caused little Refn to get obsessed with certain topics.

Not speaking of Von Trier, I know of only one concrete example of Von Trier addressing pedophilia in his movies. It was in the volume 2 of Nymphomaniac where Charlotte Gainsbourg's character does a blowjob on Jean-Marc Barr's character. Jean-Marc Barr plays a pedophile. And she does it because she finds him to be kind of similar to her. She is a nymphomaniac, which a lot of people find repulsive and awful, and she relates to the feeling this pedophile might have, having his perversion. In a way the only time Lars Von Trier talked about pedophilia, he showed it to be not that bad actually.

Now Charlotte Gainsbourg herself has a history with the subject matter. Her father Serge ( who is a French musician ) made a whole album about the subject matter. One song in particular "Lemon Incest" has vocals from both Serge and Charlotte while Charlotte was still a child. And the music video shows the two having an erotic relationship.

Now speaking about Jean-Marc Barr, we can make a bigger picture about this whole psycho-sexual analysis if we use him as a connective tissue. Jean-Marc Barr is a friend of Von Trier and a co-author with Von Trier, of the Dogme 95 movement ( meaning, if Von Trier visited Refn, Marc Barr was probably there too at some point ). And also Jean-Marc Barr plays the main character ( the guy who likes dolphins a bit too much ) in Luc Besson's film Le Grand Bleu.

Also when Von Trier did Dancer in the Dark, Björk ( who payed the main character ) received an award at Cannes for her acting in the film ( a film where Jean-Marc Barr is also present ). The person giving her that award at Cannes was non other than Luc Besson. The same Luc Besson that used her song "Venus as a Boy" in a montage sequence in his rather controversial movie Leon: The Professional. Which is controversial for showing a relationship between a little girl and a man.

Here is something absolutely insane. The movies Le Grand Bleu and Leon were produced by Gaumont. And a logo of Gaumont also appears in the opening of The Neon Demon. Which could lead us into a interesting rabbit-hole. But which also brings us back to Nicolas Winding Refn.

The strange thing about the subject matter in Refn's films is that he seems to be inconsistent about it. In Bronson the pedophile is clearly the bad guy. In Too Old to Die Young the main character is a good guy, yet he is still a pedophile. While the show also has other characters of the same nature who are bad guys. The driver in Drive ( which is a stretch to call a pedophile, but he does spend a lot of time with the kid who isn't his ) is a good guy. And I also forgot, the other guy in Drive the father of the family, who is also a good guy, tells a story about how he met his wife. And she reveals to him, during that story, that she was underage. So the father character is kind of a pedophile. And he is a good guy. The brother character from Only God Forgives and the mother character from Only God Forgives are both appear to be bad people. Yet there is a whole psycho-sexual tension, which may suggest that despite that, the main character is kind of aroused by his mom. Making it kind of unclear and complex.

The best way to try to understand this inconsistency might be through the film by Maïwenn Le Besco Polisse. Which is inconsistent, but that is kind of the point. The film basically wants people to pay attention to the fact that legal structures are not perfect in a way. And Maïwenn did have a real relationship as a child with non other than Luc Besson. Maybe Nicolas Winding Refn is trying to do the same kind of thing. He is trying to show that there are both bad and good types of pedophiles.

If we go back to The Neon Demon we have Dean who seems to be a good kind. He is trying to make a relationship with this girl. And even after he learns that she is underage, he still goes for a kiss. That Dean is confronted by the motel manager ( strangely played by Keanu Reeves of all people ). This Reeves character is a straight on rapist motherfucker. And then we have a much darker version of the same thing in Ruby. She isn't a straight up rapist. She isn't tough and stuff. She is pretending to be nice and shiny. She is pretending to be like Dean. But underneath she seems to be even worse than the motel manager guy.

Now let's think a little bit about the casting decisions. Maybe there is a clue. Keanu Reeves ( the nicest guy in Hollywood ) is a strange choice. But Keanu Reeves just a year before that made another movie about the subject matter called Knock Knock. Where he was a good guy framed to be a pedophile by 2 psychopathic girls. A theme that appears more than once in the group of people that made that film. Knock Knock was made by Eli Roth who often works with Quentin Tarantino. And I already observed a similar theme in Tarantino's Once Upon the Time... in Hollywood, where a group of hippies tried to seduce one of the main characters into joining their cult, by trying to make him break the law with one of the underage girls.

One of the girls in that "cult" is played by Dakota Fanning which I had a huge discussion about in my review of that movie. Dakota Fanning which also appeared, as a child actor, in a movie called Hounddog about the same subject matter we are discussing. Now in 2016 Dakota was not a girl that would fit the role of Jesse. She was cute as a kid, but she looks kind of intimidating now as an adult. Which makes her perfect for the Tarantino movie, but completely incompatible with the character of Jesse. So Refn didn't cast Dakota Fanning, he cast Elle Fanning. Her sister.

Dean's Karl Glusman is also an interesting actor. He appeared in a controversial film Love a year before The Neon Demon which is kind of like Von Trier's Nymphomaniac, but mixed with a style that resembles Refn. Love has unsimulated sex scenes. Which makes it technically a porno film. Like Nymphomaniac, which is something that Refn had an issue with. Strange...

Ruby played by Jena Malone is a really weird casting choice. Her most famous role is probably in the film Contact by Robert Zemeckis, where she plays a little girl version of the main character, who is played by Jodie Foster. Now Jodie Foster appeared in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver as a child prostitute. And after that she appeared in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane which is more directly about pedophilia. And Jena Malone appears in Donnie Darko that has the same subject matter. She also played a molested little girl in her first film Bastard Out of Carolina. And even before that she appears in a music video of non other than Michael Jackson for his song Childhood. You can't make this shit up...

It almost feels like the entire film industry is obsessed with pedophilia. The good, the bad and the ugly aspects of it.

So what could be the meaning of The Neon Demon? What was Nicolas Winding Refn's intention? I don't know, to be honest. But I can make a theory. It is going to be bullshit. But why not.

So we have a this young girl that is super-fucking-pretty and the reason she is so pretty appears to be that she is underage. Even if she lies about it to people, they still all want her. The Robert guy nearly cums from seeing her for the first time. The Jack photographer guy immediately wants to see her naked ( and take pictures of it ). The motel manager is obsessed with her. The other photographer, Dean is obsessed with her. Even fucking Ruby is obsessed with her. You could say Nicolas Winding Refn gives us an argument about why pedophilia should be illegal. And the arguments is: If it wasn't, adult women wouldn't stand a chance.

Now, I think to dig a little deeper, we need to look into Nicolas Winding Refn interviews. For example the one he did with Ryan Gosling about The Neon Demon which I think is comedy gold. Go watch it now, because I'm going to spoil the interview.

First of all Nicolas Winding Refn believes that every man has a 16 year old girls inside of him. And that his 16 year old girl looks like Elle Fanning. What the actual fuck? Like you are digging deeper and the shit becomes more and more interesting the longer you go. Then Refn answers "Yes" without a flinch, when asked by Gosling, whether he is a genius. So we know that Refn is a genius with a 16 year old Elle Fanning living inside of him. Good... Refn proceeds to talk about the necrophilia scene with Jena Malone. In way too much detail. Gosling literally had to stop him, because Refn was turning the interview into vocal pornography. All this time Elle Fanning, who's present, is trying to not die from cringe. She also tells that Nick's favorite song is "Let it Go" from Frozen. ( Frozen on which the father of Jullia Butters from Once Upon the Time... worked as an animator ). Also at one point a kiss between Gosling and Refn is brought up. You know the famous french-kiss the two did at Cannes one day. And Reft does say in straight language that he loves Ryan Gosling.

I don't know! What the fuck is Nicolas Winding Refn? Wow... How do you even start to analyze him psycho-sexually? There will no end for it if you try...

Happy Hacking!!!

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  Troler c:0


Every man has a 16 year old girl inside of him.

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  Troler c:1


N. W. Refn, in the interview, was straight up trolling.

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