By The most frightening aspect of Netflix's new horror film Velvet Buzzsaw is not the paintings that come to life to strangle people, but the people inhabitants of the art world itself - the critics and tastemakers who dissect works like a 'Go-Pro Kindergarten' exhibition ("Gonna break big") or a 'Hoboman' robot installation ("No originality, no courage") at Art Basel Miami, while taking selfies and smoking hash oil vapes.
The film sees director Dan Gilroy reunited with Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo, the trio who worked together on thriller, Nightcrawler. Like the 2014 film, it's a dark satire with a captivating performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, but instead of skewering the underworld of Los Angeles crime scenes, here we see the same city's glass mansions and limitless free bars.
Gyllenhaal plays Morf Vandewalt, an art critic whose opinion is treated as gospel, not least by himself. When his friend Josephina (Zawe Ashton) comes across a vast collection of paintings belonging to a dead neighbour, her boss Rhodora (Rene Russo) forces her to sell the lot, with supernatural and gruesome consequences.
Jake's Morf is delightfully ridiculous, earnestly identifying the exact Pantone shade of Josephina's skin ("the most beautiful cross between almond and saddle brown"), biting his lip as he surveys art with a look of curiosity and disgust and bemoaning that “critique is so limiting and emotionally draining”. Elsewhere the cast is crammed with stars like Toni Collette, Tom Sturridge and John Malkovich all having great fun playing eccentric dealers and artists.
Gilroy does an excellent job of crafting the grotesque kingdom of the art world, but with no care for subtlety. A Gatsby-esque pair of eyes graffitied on a wall watch over as things nosedive, and the murder of a thieving delivery man takes place at a gas station with the word ‘humble’ displayed on it. So while Velvet Buzzsaw is undoubtedly a fun gallery of horrors to mill through, its satire quickly becomes a little one-note and a farcical plot ends up feeling a bit vapid.
It's exactly the kind of whim only Netflix, with its bursting coffers, could embark on. While it's fun to watch white gallery walls get sprayed with blood in increasingly creative ways, by the end you're left scratching your head and wondering, like a critic in one of the scenes: “What does it say?”
Velvet Buzzsaw is on Netflix from 1 February
