Review: Velvet Buzzsaw

Image courtesy of Netflix.

Various works of art have been deemed dangerous over the years, but none so much, perhaps, as the haunted paintings that kill people in Dan Gilroy's horror movie cum art world satire "Velvet Buzzsaw." Alternately suspenseful and sardonically humorous, the picture remains consistently interesting even when it borders on being silly.

The film targets those who degrade art by commodifying it, from the gallery owners and critics to the artists themselves, their agents and pretentious buyers. In Gilroy's film, those who profit off art are punished by a series of creepy paintings from a mysterious unknown artist known as Vetril Dease, whose spooky work appears to hail from his own painful history.

Dease's work is discovered by gallery assistant Josephina (Zawe Ashton), who uses her find to eke out a doozy of a deal with her ruthless boss, Rhodora (Rene Russo). Josephina becomes involved with Morf (Jake Gyllenhaal), a bisexual art critic who also wants in on the action after viewing Dease's cryptic work and knows there is something unique about it. Others who take interest include an installment technician (Billy Magnussen), several artists (one with artist's block played by John Malkovich and an upcoming artist portrayed by Daveed Diggs), an agent known as Jon Dondon (Tom Sturridge) and a cutthroat gallery manager (Toni Collette). The only character to remain unscathed in the discovery is Coco (Natalia Dyer), a young assistant who bounces from gallery to gallery.

Following the discovery of Dease's work, the film's various characters find themselves trying to outwit one another in order to use the paintings for their own benefit, whether that's landing it in a gallery or museum exhibit, selling it to the highest bidder or getting a book deal out of it. Josephina notes early on that Dease, whom she finds dead in his apartment, had apparently wanted all of the work to be destroyed. The characters should have heeded the warning.

While the film's first half focuses more on the satire, its second half plays as a slasher film with a series of paintings acting as the killer. One's capacity to enjoy the film might be determined by whether one can swallow the silly premise. And yet, "Velvet Buzzsaw" is a gorgeously shot L.A. noir featuring some terrific nighttime and daytime shots of the city's skyline and boasts some solid performances. As a horror movie, it is often creepy.

Perhaps Gilroy's film doesn't say much about the pretensions of the art world and the commodification of art that hasn't already been said numerous times before, but the movie is an often humorous - and occasionally bloody - horror satire. It might not be as good as the director's neo-noir "Nightcrawler," which included a fairly potent indictment of TV news, but when you see as many movies as I do each year, originality becomes a sought-after prize - and "Velvet Buzzsaw" is quite unlike anything else you'll likely see this year.