Velvet Buzzsaw
Directed by Dan Gilroy
Produced by Jennifer Fox
Written by Dan Gilroy
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Toni Collette, Zawe Ashton, Tom Sturridge, Natalia Dyer, Daveed Diggs, Billy Magnussen and John Malkovich
First off, Velvet Buzzsaw is a slasher movie.
That said, I’m going to be using all sorts of words you don’t normally associate with that particular genre. Words like sophisticated, witty, satiric, hilarious, and urbane.
The title is evocative of Andy Warhol, and I kept expecting him to show up in the film, even though he’s been dead for over thirty years. It’s that sort of film.
Director Dan Gilroy has teamed up with Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo. Again. The last time they did, they produced an incendiary noir masterpiece about vulture journalism, Nightcrawler.
While this effort lacks the intensity of Nightcrawler, it has dark, even black humor. Most of the cast get killed off in amusing ways.
A reclusive old guy, Vetril Dease (Alan Mandell) drops dead on the balcony in front of his flat. His body is found by a neighbor, Josefina (Zawe Ashton) who just happens to be an ambitious and immoral assistant to an art gallery owner. The assistant sees the body off, and then snoops in the Dease’s apartment, with an eye to rescuing his cat. She finds hundreds of painting, dark, violent, evocative, along with a handwritten note penned by Dease stipulating that all the artwork must be destroyed upon his death.
But the artwork has clear commercial value, and through the agency of Josefina, the art world vultures, crass, pretentious, insular and arrogant, descend and begin picking large strips of money and vacuous art-world prestige off the rotting corpse of Dease.
But Dease has placed a curse on anyone who profits from his work. And the art starts killing people.
Slasher film deaths have a certain tonality to them. Some are meant to evoke horror, pity, fear, and even contempt. Some are funny, especially when it’s the arrogant college linebacker, or the snotty sorority girl.
In Velvet Buzzsaw, the main tone is that of irony. The murders are customized to the personalities of the victims, albeit with a certain amount of subtlety. One guy is dragged into nothingness by a troupe of monkeys, and the viewer can only smile and nod and consider it fitting. One woman dies after sitting down next to her cat in the shadow of a couple of saguaro cactii. I’m not sure if the cat, the close parenthesis to the cat that triggered the story in the first place, survived. But the death does explain the title of the movie, and once again, evokes Warhol.
The satirical look at the snobbish and insular art community who have suborned an entire nation’s art production into a cash cow for the amusement of the top 1/100 of one percent, while unlikely to provoke a revolution, will cover that community in derisive laughter. And deservedly so.
MOMA is closed for the next six months so they can install toilets that flush artists rather than their droppings or something like that. So Velvet Buzzsaw is an adequate (and much cheaper) substitute.
Now on Netflix.