Velvet Buzzsaw

Netflix has fast become the place for quality filmmakers to go, get showered with money, and turn out the movies that they want to make. Sometimes that's bad, but as with a shotgun, some pellets hit. Velvet Buzzsaw, written and directed by Dan Gilroy, is the second horror movie of the season (following Bird Box) to create something of a sensation--water cooler Netflix. But unlike Bird Box, Velvet Buzzsaw is funny, and much bloodier (they also both star John Malkovich).

The first half of the film is a satire of the art world. I have no idea how authentic it is (it is highly doubtful that an art critic would be wealthy, unless he was a trust-fund baby or something) but the characters speak in a wonderfully pretentious patois that makes you hate them all. Therefore, when the second half kicks in, and the characters start dying off, a delicious sense of justice seeps through the bloodstream.

Velvet Buzzsaw is sort of like a feature-length episode of Tales From the Crypt. An assistant at an art gallery (Zawe Ashton), finds an old man dead in the hallway of her apartment building. She finds out he has scores of paintings inside, vividly grotesque, like a cross between Edvard Munch and Lucien Freud. She walks off with the paintings, and her boss (Rene Russo) helps her market them. They become a sensation.

But the painter, Vetril Dease (if this name seems like an anagram, it is, of "dearest evil") made explicit instructions that his work be destroyed. It is also discovered that he used his own blood in the paintings, and if you stare at them for a while, they move.

The main character in the film is Jake Gyllenhaal as a prissy critic. He is gay, though enters a sexual relationship with Ashton and wants to write a book about Dease. He finds out that he was an abused child and spent several years in an asylum for the criminally insane. Other characters who flit through are a rival gallery owner (Tom Sturridge), who literally can not tell art from garbage; a deceitful museum curator (Toni Collette), and a famous artist (Malkovich) who has painter's block.

This is all a hoot, if superficial. These are types, rather than realistic characters--Russo the ball-busting boss, Gyllenhaal the empty intellectual, and Daveed Driggs as a street artist with integrity. Then the killings start.

I won't spoil the fun, but many of the characters get killed by artwork--one person is pulled into a painting of monkeys fixing a car (if only they had used the Dogs Playing Poker paintings), another gets their arm ripped off by a giant installation that looks like a cube--the joke being the dead body lying next to it is mistaken for part of the art). A running joke is that a put-upon assistant (Natalia Dyer) constantly keeps finding the bodies.

The title refers to a punk rock band that Russo used to belong to, and if it seems like a trivial thing to hang a title on, just wait. This is the kind of movie that things in the first half end up coming back in the second, sometimes murderously so.

Velvet Buzzsaw is genuinely both funny and creepy, but not really scary (the music tells you when someone is about to die). It will also make you look at the art in your house a little more carefully.