The trailer for Velvet Buzzsaw is a chimerical thing. The first half sells a delicious send-up of the art scene. The “coastal elites” that America loves to hate lean toward expensive art. They murmur terms like “mesmeric” as they nibble their Armani frames. Halfway through the clip, the trailer rears its second head, revealing the campiest of horror as the apparently possessed paintings deliver unto these moneyed elites their bloody comeuppance.
The only through line, stitching these two movies together with Dr. Frankenstein’s hand, is thumping techno. The music, transitioning from sexy electro to dread-inducing industrial, convinces us that either of these movies would be a good time. But can they work together? Velvet Buzzsaw is true to the luxurious bite of its incongruous title. Like Frankenstein’s monster, animated by who-knows-what, pieced together from who-knows-who, this thing is alive, and it’s worth a look.
Check out the trailer for the Velvet Buzzsaw, a Netflix exclusive now streaming:
The movie succeeds because it insists on remaining split. Every piece of Velvet Buzzsaw is its own, every character is uncompromisingly himself. Director Dan Gilroy achieves an aesthetic whole by balancing every aspect of the film—visual, thematic, and generic—against every other. The demonic artwork at the center of the film is mixed media: blood and oil on canvas. Velvet Buzzsaw finds its fire in a similar mix of the beautiful and horrifying.
Immediately, the film’s visuals, especially costume design, arrest the eye. As one might expect of players in the Los Angeles art scene, every character has a style uniquely their own. No dress, no sock could suit any character besides the one who wears it.
Art critic Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal) and dealer Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo) review a new piece.
Here, Morf’s shirt and suit contrast black and midnight blue, bespeaking his ability to appreciate subtly of tone. His tielessness communicates his willingness to defy convention, as all critics must. Rhodora’s costume is similarly elegant, comprising no less than seven pieces of gold jewelry, and she’s after more.
There is no overlap. Both have an eye for art, but Morf is the aesthete. All Rhodora can see are dollar signs, and she knows them when sees them.
Similarly, the artists of the movie have unmistakable wardrobes. Damrish, played by Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs, wears the typically “street” hoodie and chain while John Malkovich’s Piers only owns denim tops, evidently.
Damrish and Piers confronted by a superior talent.
Late in the film when Coco (Natalia Dyer) shows up to a meeting in a homely lavender sweater, as if she’d rushed from the set of Stranger Things without a wardrobe change, it’s a clue that she is not long for the art world. She sticks out like a lonely conformist in a sea of visionary individuals.
The irony of Coco’s wardrobe emblematizes Velvet Bloodsaw’s propulsive energy. Like Coco, this movie about the avant garde is quite conventional or, rather, an unconventional mash-up of conventions. The film’s newness comes from old formulas held together by sheer artistic willfulness.
The first convention is the spoof. Morf’s lack of humanity contrasts, stunningly, with his appreciation for art. Gyllenhaal expertly plays his character through every scene, observing everything and everyone while somehow gliding just above authentic personal connection. Russo’s worldliness keeps the action grounded, however, lest the tone grow too unserious.
From the first instant that Gyllenhaal’s Morf struts into frame, and right past the gallery’s entry line, he becomes film’s most dislikable-yet-entertaining critic since the bad guy from Ratatouille. Morf consigns loser artists to the dustbin without a thought and celebrates the achievement of the winners, no matter the cost to the artist’s soul.
“Sober hasn’t been good for him,” Morf muses regarding Piers. To the sins of being young, rich, and intelligent, Morf adds contempt for the artist. One senses the karmic noose laying around Morf’s neck like a Burberry scarf.
Satire could provide any number of plot conventions for Morf’s second act. Perhaps he and his set are laid low by the just vicissitudes of taste. Perhaps a young critic dismisses Morf as casually as Morf has destroyed any number of careers. The movie’s brilliance is that the justice is in the genre shift. It’s not his career that justice demands, it’s his blood, like a sacrifice to the old gods who can bring life back.
(Interestingly, the art that gets Morf in the end is “Hoboman,” the one piece that even acknowledges Middle America—its love of superheroes, its past achievement, its present hardship—if it does so bizarrely.)
The saw rotates, and the film’s pomp turns to mere camp, and the camp works. The change is as well balanced as any woodshop instrument. These vain sinners suffer, only more spectacularly than the satire demands.
By the close of Velvet Buzzsaw, it is remarkable how classically moralistic the resolution of the bloody mess turns out to be. The artists, at least the good ones, survive, but those bearing lucre-stained palms meet a grisly end. Thus, the film satisfies the demands of both the satire and every rule of horror that Scream enumerated.
Still, the movie remains ominously open-ended. Will the horror continue? This writer hopes he has been one of the good ones, but suspects that all critics share a common (and well earned) fate.
Trevor Babcock is a Visiting Lecturer at Indiana University where he earned his PhD in literature in 2017. He has written on Hereditary and the Changeling myth here and on Beyond the Black Rainbow here.
