What the Market Deserves
I’ve never been certain what kind of horror fan I am. There’s the gore school—maximum blood, maximum screaming, genre as pure sensory assault. There’s the comfort-horror school, where bad effects and camp acting create a warm, low-stakes space that’s more like entertainment than threat. And then there’s the third kind: the film made with real intent, that wants you to sit with the possibility that something this bad could happen to you, that offers no safety valve. I move between all three and I’m not sure what that says about me.
Velvet Buzzsaw, Dan Gilroy’s Netflix horror-satire, starts in territory that’s almost too easy to mock. The Los Angeles contemporary art world—where everything must be more extreme than what came before just to register any feeling at all, where market value and cultural value have been so thoroughly collapsed that nobody can tell them apart anymore. Gilroy, who made Nightcrawler with some of the same cast, knows this world and knows how to make it look exactly as hollow as it is.
Then the paintings start killing people. A discovered cache of obsessive work by a dead unknown artist turns out to be lethal to anyone who tries to profit from it. The art takes back what commerce extracted. It’s a genuinely good premise—maybe a great one—and the kills are inventive enough that they feel thematic rather than incidental. The horror and the satire are saying the same thing, which is rarer than it sounds.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays the central art critic as a man who has excavated himself in the service of his own taste. Rene Russo, Toni Collette, Zawe Ashton, Tom Sturridge, Natalia Dyer, Daveed Diggs, Billy Magnussen, and John Malkovich fill in a world where almost everyone is complicit in something, and the performances have the specific quality of actors committing to satire—fully present but with one eyebrow raised.
It’s not a classic. The horror and comedy don’t always share space without friction, and the film occasionally seems uncertain which it wants to be. But there’s real pleasure in watching carefully constructed genre work take aim at people who probably deserve it. If you’re tired of horrors that exist to kill pretty teenagers and want something with an actual target in its sights, it’s worth an evening.