“A Dangerous Girl”: Elle Fanning’s Incredible ‘Neon Demon’ Performance, Five Years Later

The girl was always going to die. 

The very first image in Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, released five years ago this month (and streaming on Amazon Prime), is of Elle Fanning’s Jesse splayed across an ornate sofa, in a dress with the same dull shimmer of a body bag, blood decorating her elegant neck. Though we don’t know it yet, it’s her first photo shoot since moving from Georgia to Los Angeles to try her hand at a modeling career, and Refn has already made her fate plain. She’s a sacrifice, an offering on a glittery altar, and we’ll spend the next two hours learning why. 

Or will we? There’s a tendency to view Refn’s films, particularly in the last decade, as beautiful but often cold exercises in style over substance. From the stoic Driver with his scorpion jacket in Drive to the haunted characters who stalk Too Old To Die Young, it’s easy to see his characters as ciphers, gorgeous simulacra walking doomed neon landscapes. 

This is especially true of The Neon Demon because of how quickly and determinedly it leans into that idea of style over substance, and external beauty over internal complexity. At one point the characters themselves have that very debate in a lavish restaurant, and not long after we’ve met her, Jesse herself admits that she has “no real talent. But I’m pretty, and I can make money off pretty.”

Like nearly all of Refn’s films, The Neon Demon proved divisive, and to its detractors lines like Jesse’s “I can make money off pretty” were practically a confession that Refn would rather simply shoot beautiful people doing terrible things to each other than tell an actual story. Look closer, though, and The Neon Demon becomes a captivating study not just in the hollow worship of beauty, but in the personalities who shape that worship in all its unholy glory. Though the film features compelling work from Abbey Lee, Bella Heathcote, and the great Jena Malone, it all begins and ends with Fanning. Revisiting the film five years later, it’s her performance that stands out the most, not just for its mercurial qualities, but for her striking ability to convincingly be everything the other characters believe her to be, and more. 

Jesse arrives in Los Angeles, apparently after losing both her parents and searching for a path of her own, as the picture of a wide-eyed ingenue, a princess figure in Refn’s dark fairy tale. Her would-be photographer boyfriend Dean (Karl Glusman) pins this persona to her right away, as does Ruby (Jena Malone), her first industry friend who assures her the “deer in headlights look” is exactly what will help her get ahead. To them, she is the picture of starstruck innocence, someone who perhaps doesn’t know what she has yet, at least until she meets a modeling agent (Christina Hendricks) who assures her that greatness lies in her future providing she can survive. This exchange in particular highlights Jesse’s perceived innocence, but when she tells the agent she’s not sure she can convince anyone that she’s actually of legal age instead of her true age of 16, the agent delivers a telling reply that helps set the course for the rest of the film:

“People believe what they are told.”

As Jesse’s meteoric rise in the fashion world begins, her fellow models see her as something beyond the fresh-faced, possibly naive princess that everyone before them seemed to perceive. To Gigi (Heathcote), a model obsessed with perfection through plastic surgery, the literal honing of her professional edge, Jesse must have her own ways of cutting (pun intended) through the competition. She must, Gigi assumes, be sleeping with the photographers and designers who’ve been so quick to put her in the spotlight, because how else would it happen so quickly? For Sarah (Lee), it’s something more mystical. Jesse’s competitive edge comes not from shameless instincts, but from within, something Sarah tries to literally taste when she sees the other girl accidentally cut herself. She can’t mimic it, can’t alter herself to be it, so the only way is to consume. 

Sarah’s approach is, ultimately, the fate all three of the women surrounding Jesse agree on for her, as they attack and literally devour her in an abandoned mansion shortly after she rebuffs Ruby’s sexual advances. The prophecy of the film’s opening shot comes true as Jesse is transformed into a literal blood sacrifice for the sake of the beauty and power of others, greasing the wheels of the machine she was just beginning to be a part of. 

Before her ritualistic death, though, Jesse goes through a ritual of her own, and it’s here that Fanning’s performance transmutes from good to great. Refn presents her first runway show, in which she’s selected at the last minute to wear the showcase piece and be the closing model, as a surrealistic, singular trip into the unknown. In a wordless sequence, Fanning walks through  a black void lit by flickering neon triangles, representing the metamorphosis of her professional and personal life. The triangle motif continues until she seems to be having a silent conversation, even a love affair, with various versions of her self, planting kisses on her reflection, perhaps saying hello to the woman she’s becoming, perhaps bidding farewell to the girl she’s leaving behind. It’s a remarkable moment in terms of Refn’s visualization made more remarkable but Fanning’s incredible ability to use her large, expressive eyes to convey not just shifting emotions, but shifting personalities. 

Jesse emerges different on the other side of this show, something reflected in her wardrobe, but as she explains to Dean when he worries she’s about to succumb to a shallow world: “I don’t want to be them. I want to be me.”

But who is she? What are we to make of the Jesse who’s emerged from that neon chrysalis with darker eyes and flashier clothes? In her final monologue, she tells us, or seems to, by echoing something her mother used to call her: “A Dangerous Girl.”

In her final moments, perched on the edge of a diving board looming out over an empty pool, Jesse seems to get it. She is a dangerous girl, just as her mother told her, capable of inspiring love and jealousy and blind rage in equal measure, often all at once. Whether she’s to blame for this or if it’s just the way she came into the world, it’s what she is, and as she says it she perhaps unwittingly ventures into the realm of prophecy. 

The girl was always going to die, and in those final scenes, even as she fights, Fanning is able to convince us that perhaps, somewhere deep down, she too knew it all along. 

Perhaps more than any other character in Nicolas Winding Refn’s brutal, luxuriant films, Jesse is most primed to be a blank canvas upon which audiences can project whatever meaning they like, whether they’d prefer her to be the innocent princess caught in a haunted castle or the apex predator only playing at innocence, hunting and punishing even beyond her own death. The performance could have coasted entirely on Fanning’s looks, the always on-point wardrobe, and the precision of Refn’s visual language. Instead, Elle Fanning did something sublime. She was able to play a character who is many things to many different people, perhaps even to herself, and convince us that she is all of those things, often with little more than a look but always with total, vulnerable believability. She’s a doomed princess. She’s a canny showwoman. She’s beauty incarnate.

She’s a dangerous girl. 

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire whose work has appeared at Syfy Wire, Mental Floss, Looper, Playboy, and Uproxx, among others. He lives in Austin, Texas, and he’s always counting the days until Christmas. Find him on Twitter: @awalrusdarkly.

Watch The Neon Demon on Amazon Prime