Screenwriter Dan Gilroy received immense acclaim in 2014 for his directorial debut Nightcrawler. This film established Gilroy’s unique blend of disturbing, uncanny imagery with a subtle, yet effective splash of social critique. Gilroy attempted to take his approach to the modern art world with the Netflix premiere of his latest film, Velvet Buzzsaw.
Velvet Buzzsaw tells the story of Victor Dease, a deceased man—played by Alan Mandell—who leaves behind a large body of paintings found by his neighbor Josephine—portrayed by Zawe Ashton. Dease’s paintings are picked up by art gallery owner and Josephine’s boss Rhodora Haze—played by Rene Russo—whose gallery gives Dease’s work considerable fame.
As more and more people become fascinated with Dease’s work, especially art critic Morf Vandewalt—portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal—supernatural forces begin raising hell on the artwork and all who admire it.
As a horror movie, Velvet Buzzsaw is derivative. The horror is executed well enough, but the scary imagery and death scenes have been done far better in the past.
The horrific scenes are separated from the main plot of the film and don’t take up a great amount of screen time. Scenes between any horror imagery lack any tension or suspense and hurt the film’s pacing as a result.
This trend isn’t helped by the fact that none of the characters are relatable or likable enough to illicit any emotional investment from the audience. While acting giants like Jake Gyllenhaal, Toni Collette and John Malkovich all lend their talents to this film, the characters are thinly written and give the cast little to work with.
This choice is deliberate as the film also attempts to critique the modern art world as something vapid, arrogant and money-obsessed. These characters all fit this mold well at the expense of being deep enough to have the audience care about them.
This focus on modern art gives the film a brilliant setting for plenty of off-the-wall scenarios and shots. The cinematography shows breaths of creativity and provides plenty of weird, disturbing imagery to chew on. Yet it isn’t imaginative enough throughout the film to establish its own identity.
The aforementioned myriad of weird and disturbing imagery in Velvet Buzzsaw is nothing but that: weird. The art exhibits and settings presented throughout the film succeed in confusing audiences, but the subtle commentary that made Nightcrawler wonderful is replaced by commentary that is too on the nose for its own good.
The world presented in Velvet Buzzsaw represents the most extreme stereotypes that are associated with the modern art community. The settings and characters of the film are so surreal that it’s totally unrealistic. Whatever commentary the film is trying to explore is totally lost on the audience because it’s incredibly hard to connect the events of the film to those of our reality.
At its best, the imagery of Velvet Buzzsaw is simply pretentious, with the director trying to emphasize points that are blatant to the audience and add no true insight to what we understand about art. This fact is exacerbated by the more horrific aspects of the film, which are purely supernatural and don’t connect well to the rest of the film’s plot.
Overall, Velvet Buzzsaw tries to be both a horror film and a social commentary, and in doing so fails at both. Its horrific elements aren’t terribly original while the social commentary is too spot-on to offer insight. Despite the promise Dan Gilroy’s career had with Nightcrawler, Velvet Buzzsaw serves as little more than a buzzkill for Gilroy’s momentum.