VELVET BUZZSAW is the latest Netflix-released movie and a follow-up to Dan Gilroy's NIGHTCRAWLER, featuring the tag-team pairing of Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo once more. This time around the setting is the cynical and venal world of modern art collecting, where a bunch of characters come into contact with weird works of art belonging to a recently-deceased artist.
It's definitely a mixed bag of a movie, one in which the bad has equal measure with the good. The film is split into two distinct halves; the first is the scene-setting world-building of modern art, and it's this that's most interesting, offering a fresh and vivid take on a kind of niche world that few of us will ever encounter. The characters are quirky and interesting, if not exactly likeable, although there are perhaps a few too many for any individual to stand out. Sadly, the second half of the film descends into a simplistic supernatural horror film of the kind we've seen done a million times before; thrown-in CGI blood and predictable scares simply don't cut it and waste an intriguing premise.
It's definitely a mixed bag of a movie, one in which the bad has equal measure with the good. The film is split into two distinct halves; the first is the scene-setting world-building of modern art, and it's this that's most interesting, offering a fresh and vivid take on a kind of niche world that few of us will ever encounter. The characters are quirky and interesting, if not exactly likeable, although there are perhaps a few too many for any individual to stand out. Sadly, the second half of the film descends into a simplistic supernatural horror film of the kind we've seen done a million times before; thrown-in CGI blood and predictable scares simply don't cut it and waste an intriguing premise.