(SeaPRwire) –
By: Oliver Hawthorne
Critics dragged Nicolas Winding Refn’s *The Neon Demon* through the mud when it hit theaters in 2016. They called it exploitative, puerile, a garish misstep from the director who had wowed them with *Drive* five years prior. Ten years later, the film does not read like a sloppy thriller. It reads like a premonition. It mapped every ugly contour of the modern beauty industrial complex before that complex had fully scaled across every major social platform. We laughed at its over-the-top gore and shallow characters. We were looking at a mirror held up to a future we were already building.
The film centers on Jesse, a blank, teenaged aspiring model played by Elle Fanning. She arrives in Los Angeles from small-town Georgia with no clear family ties, no discernible hobbies or talents. Her only asset, as she puts it bluntly, is her face. “I can’t sing, I can’t dance, I can’t write…no real talent. But I’m pretty, and I can make money off pretty.” She books her first gigs by connecting with a random stranger online who wants to take her photos. She does not chase followers, curate a personal brand, or pander to a mass fan base. That choice read like a dated throwback in 2016. It reads now as a quiet fantasy of a less totalizing beauty market.
A 2026 Glamour retrospective captures the tone of 2016 online beauty perfectly. That was the era of thick liquid eyeliner, dramatic cut creases, bold matte lipstick in deep purple and fuchsia shades. People overlined their lips to copy Kylie Jenner’s pout without fear of being labeled cringe or cheugy. Social media still felt like a place to play, not a place to perform for algorithmic reward.
Critics in 2016 fixated on the film’s cruelty, its giallo-inspired stylization, its gory final act. New York Times critic Glenn Kenny dismissed the film as ridiculous and puerile. They fixated on the tense dynamic between Jesse and Gigi, a veteran model played by Bella Heathcoate who had undergone extensive plastic surgery to achieve an industry ideal look.
At the time, that level of surgical modification read as extreme. Data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons records 17.1 million surgical and minimally invasive cosmetic procedures performed in 2016. That marked a 3 percent increase from the year prior, with Botox as the most popular treatment. By 2025, facial procedure volumes had surged alongside widespread GLP-1 weight loss drug use and mainstream body contouring treatments. Gigi’s once-shocking array of procedures would not raise an eyebrow today.
The film does not flinch from the exploitation baked into the industry. A teenage girl in the hotel room next to Jesse’s is assaulted one night. No one comes to her aid, no one reports the attack. The film, rooted in 2016 cultural framing, focuses heavily on infighting between women. It does not fully center the wider, profit-driven system that enables that abuse and exploitation. Fellow model Sarah, played by Abbey Lee, spells out the unspoken rule of the industry. Women constantly size each other up, asking who a peer is sleeping with to get ahead. Jesse never trades sex for gigs, but she is still pressured to bare her body for photographers, to shrink herself to fit others’ expectations.
The film’s climax sees Sarah, Gigi, and Jena Malone’s character Ruby murder Jesse. They bathe in her blood, eat pieces of her body, in a ritualistic act of consumption. That sequence was written off as cheap shock value in 2016. It now reads as a literal metaphor for how the industry operates. It feeds on the fresh faces and naivety of young new arrivals, draining their value to sustain the people already at the top. It shares a clear creative throughline with recent hit *The Substance*, which frames public aging for women as a body horror nightmare of self-cannibalization. Where *The Substance* depicts a single woman consuming herself to cling to youth, *The Neon Demon* shows an entire community feeding on the most vulnerable new entrants to the system.
The film’s core line about making money off pretty has only grown sharper ten years on. The commercial loop that was still forming in 2016 is now fully locked in. Platforms algorithmically reward narrow, homogenized beauty standards to drive endless engagement. Creators and ordinary users alike spend thousands on procedures, pharmaceuticals, makeup, and filters to hit those moving targets. Clinics, pharma companies, and beauty brands collect direct revenue from that spend. Platforms collect ad dollars from the endless scroll of content produced by people chasing the next ideal. The old modeling world Jesse navigated was small, insulated, cruel but limited in its reach. The new beauty economy touches every user with a social media account, no agency contract required. The film’s once-shocking vision of women literally consuming each other to get ahead is no longer a gory fantasy. It is standard operating procedure for an industry that now extracts value from everyone, not just the small pool of girls who move to LA to model. The version of the industry Jesse lived in, where you only had to impress the next photographer, looks quaint by comparison. A far darker heart beats at the center of the beauty market now, just as Refn warned it would. *The Neon Demon* is currently streaming on Prime Video.
Author bio: Oliver Hawthorne, Principal Correspondent for a global technology review, covering platform economics, digital culture, and tech’s widespread societal impacts.