I'm not one for superstitions, personally. I don't really hold much truck with voodoo, hexes and all those spooky shenanigans. I am starting to believe that Netflix has somehow drawn down some sort of curse. There is an unfathomable mediocrity infesting the streaming service that has seeped into pretty much all of their high profile cinematic output: Bright was ironically dull and uninspired, Annihilation was willfully odd but ultimately unfulfilling, The Cloverfield Paradox was just unmitigated toss (unsurprisingly seeing as it was a crappy low budget sci-fi crap fest crow-barred into the Cloverfield universe), Bird Box was a half-arsed shot at replicating the success of A Quiet Place and more recently Polar, which you might have gathered from last week thought it was John Wick but was more like John Weak, am I right? Punning.
You have to be hopeful though, because there's always a decent amount of pedigree involved in either the actors or the directors, but somehow it just never quite comes off right. It's like going out and buying premium ingredients for a delicious burger and then serving up a slightly tepid slice of dry meat between cardboard-textured buns and wondering why people don't rush out to tell their friends about it. Velvet Buzzsaw is the next disappointment burger off the assembly line.
Admittedly, it was always going to be a bit more of a tough sell than usual; a supernatural suspense horror set in the world of fine art dealerships isn't ever going to be your average slasher flick. The trailer made it look pretty good though; paintings flickering to life and causing havoc, increasing levels of dread, strings of bloody corpses. Seemed pretty legit; massive spoilers in the trailer of course, because that's how trailers roll nowadays, but legit none the less. Sadly, the Curse of the Netflix-clusive strikes fairly hard.
The set-up is fairly straightforward as far as these things go; old geezer dies in the apartment building of an up and coming art dealer's assistant, leaving behind a host of creepy paintings and strict instructions for them all to be destroyed. Obviously, she ignores this and decides to start selling them to the elite assholes of LA's cut-throat art scene. The oil paint eventually hits the fan and creepy chaos ensues. Well sort of. It unfurls slowly and awkwardly for the next hour or so but never really hits stride.
The performances themselves are all fine. Gyllenhal stands out as the snippy, sexually fickle art reviewer but all in all there's a problem, and it's a problem that haunts the vast majority of modern horrors; every single character here is in one way or another a horrendous dickhead and you have exactly zero sympathy for any of them when they bite it. The dealers, brokers, assistants and artists are all just tools of various degrees. Even the gallery technician is a douche bag of the highest order and when they all eventually get to buying the farm it's neither a surprise nor an emotional wrench of any kind. The fact they all get what they deserve is probably part of the central theme, but there isn't enough of a connection that it matters one way or another. There's a current of dark humour running underneath everything which again doesn't really hit the mark and just sort of sticks out like a freshly dismembered thumb. I mean, honestly it ought to be grim viewing to watch school kids traipse through pools of relatively fresh arterial blood but it just sort of washes by in a bit that takes any gravitas out of the situation but doesn't replace it with anything. Overall though, these dickheads get exactly what they deserve, but it's not even cathartic.
The effects are OK, if not stellar as various bits of art slink into life and start taking their creators revenge, but you never really get to know what his beef was; we know he's been mixing his own blood into his paints from the trailer, but we don't get any further explanation of why or whatever else might be going on. For all the supposed spooky goings on, there's actually very little tension and honestly nothing that sticks with you. There's so much potential to show any of the unwilling participants to showcase their slow declines into madness but we just get a few people who think they're hallucinating a bit and then die in a slightly odd fashion. I mean, what's the lesson here? Anti-greed maybe, or anti-asshole or anti-pretentiousness? Honestly it feels like it isn't really sure itself; it sort of wants to be a scathing assault on the ridiculous and self-serving art world but it kind of doesn't reach that mark. I'm not even entirely sure what specifically 'art' has done to deserve the bashing either at this point; I get it though, because I still to this day not fully understand why everyone seems to love Banksy, considering his justifications and themes for his 'edgy' graffiti is roughly equivalent to your average A-Level art student. Congratulations, you paid a bunch of craftsmen and technicians to build a shitty theme park to show us how evil Disney is. I'd have never have known without. It even manages to give us a standard "oh no, it's not over" moment like every other modern horror movie released in the last 10 years.
Netflix is not without its merits, of course. It's got three decent Godzilla animations off the ground and series like Stranger Things, Daredevil and Punisher have been pretty decent, but for some reason there have been some struggles in that long format. The law of averages would seem to suggest that at some point soon that curse will lift, but for now? Not so much.
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