For those of you who have been following my reviews for a while you will be aware that the Netflix Originals that I have reviewed so far have ranged from really bad to pretty good, none of them have been great so far. I was very helpful that this was going to change when I saw the trailer for Dan Gilroy's "Velvet Buzzsaw" (2019). It looked like a really interesting concept, with a great cast and fun horror elements, and it had the added benefit of starring Jake Gyllenhaal who may just be my favourite actor at the minute. So, I was quite excited to see this film, and I was really expecting Netflix to turn their form around. Unfortunately, this was not the case. This film was a big disappointment to me. It is not a terrible film by any stretch of the imagination. It has interesting ideas and some really great visuals, but it is very muddled, and it is unclear on what exactly it is trying to be. Is it a dark comedy? A suspenseful thriller? A pure horror film? I don't know, but whatever it is it is a mess. The story of the film follows the art worlds obsession with a new, unknown artist, whose work is found in his apartment after his death. Its popularity sees several investors and dealers fighting over the ability to display the pieces. However, there is a dark past to the artist and dark secret in his paintings which leads to anyone who profited from the work to be in fatal danger.
The film does have some positive aspects to it. The performances range from good to great across the board. Rene Russo is good as Rhodora Haze, a former 70s Punk Band member who moved in to the art world after the band broke up. She is an intimidating, headstrong character who knows what she wants and knows how to get it, and Russo manages to pull this off well. Zawe Ashton is also good as Josephina, an employee of Rhodora Haze, who is the one who finds the paintings in the apartment, and in doing so goes from being a sympathetic and quite likeable character to being sucked into this world of obnoxious arty people who think they are cultured, geniuses, and she becomes thoroughly unlikeable. John Malkovich is also good as Piers, an artist going through a creative block. It is a good performance, but it is effectively just Malkovich playing himself. Then we come to the top two performances, Toni Collette as Gretchen and Jake Gyllenhaal as Morf Vandelwalt. This may be a biased opinion seeing as I am a big fan of both these actors, but they both put in brilliant performances and are easily the most entertaining parts of the film. They grip you every time they are on screen and they both carry themselves with the confidence of people who think they know better than they do which is perfect for their characters. Both characters also have great big personality changes in the film and Collete and Gyllenhaal are able to portray these changes very well and make them believable with what is going on in their lives. The film also looks really good. The whole concept of the film means that the film can be very creative with its mise en scene and set pieces, filling them with weird and interesting looking art pieces. It keeps the film colourful and interesting visual throughout which is a good thing, because the story is not all that gripping in its self.
Despite the good performances and interesting visuals, the film just feels like a muddled mess. When it starts it feels like it is going to be a dark comedy critiquing the nature of the "art upper class", those people who see art as commercial opportunities rather than respecting them for the artistic expression that has been put into them. It does manage to do this, but it stumbles in getting there, and eventually just blurts out an tell you that is what it was trying to get across when Josephina literally says, "What's the point in art if no one can see it?" The whole tone of the film is muddled as well. If the film had gone all in on a satirical comedy tone for the first half and then dove into full on horror tone for the second, I think this would have been effective. Instead it flicks between satirical comedy, horror and just kind of nothing throughout the film. It seems to not be able to tell whether it really wants to be funny, or really wants to be scary, or really wants to be just a slow and plodding mystery film, and this means that the film just feels like such a mess constantly. I was really hoping that it just took the last twenty minutes to just go fully into gory horror, and if it had done this, I think it may have boosted the film in my opinion. But instead it spreads its horror sequences out, and even these are not very scary. There is one horror scene which is very creative and brilliantly gory, however. I won't spoil it here, but it is a fantastic scene which leads to a mess of blood and guts, which is actually quite a good metaphor for this film.
Velvet Buzzsaw is quite likely to be the most disappointing film I see this year. After seeing Gilroy's earlier film, Nightcrawler (2014), and really enjoying it, my expectations for this film were quite high. This may have affected my viewing and enjoyment of the film as I did have high expectations, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that this film was a scrambled mess of ideas and styles which never meshed to make a cohesive film. It does have some very good performances and some really nice visuals, and I think the concept is also a very interesting one, but the film as a whole does not do these performances, visuals or ideas justice. However, I am stumped on whether to recommend it or not. I think there is enough there for people to enjoy the film, but I don't think you need to rush out to see it and so it is a very light recommendation from me. Netflix continues to disappoint me with its films, and it is starting to become a hard battle to win me back to their original films.