“VELVET BUZZSAW” WOULD’VE BEEN A CLASSIC IF THEY’D MADE ONE CHANGE…

The other day, Netflix released a new thriller from Dan Gilroy, starring (among others) Jake Gyllenhaal; the same pair that had great success with “Nightcrawler.” It’s a satirical horror film set in the world of modern day art, and it has the unbelievably awesome title of “Velvet Buzzsaw.” Jake gets top billing, but the legendary Rene Russo is the true lead, supported by an impressive ensemble.

I really enjoyed this movie. I might even love it. I don’t know if it’s an authentic portrait of the world of modern art, but it felt real, and the characters were rendered with an impressive balance of satire and pathos. Gyllenhaal, Russo, Toni Collete, John Malkovich Zawe Ashton, and Natalia Dyer are all excellent. I really had fun watching these great actors dance around each other. They know they’re in a satire, but they embrace their characters and play them sincerely.

Still, I have to admit there is something… wrong here. The movie feels a little under-cooked, handsomely mounted but not quite sure of what it is. Netflix has a famously lassiez-faire development approach, which means you get all the rough edges and weirdness that a studio system normally smothers out, but it also means that sometimes they take one out of the oven too soon, which is the case here.

I think Dan Gilroy was close to his masterpiece here. Another draft would’ve served him well, and one narrative change in particular, albeit a large one, would’ve gotten him over the finish line. Want to know what it is?

(VERY MINOR SPOILERS)

Remove the supernatural and make it about a serial killer instead.

You see, “Velvet Buzzsaw” is about evil paintings that slowly murder a series of artists, curators and critics who acquire and profit from them. The problem is, this supernatural component feels really half-hearted. The horror sequences based around the paintings coming to life are not scary, and the mechanics of how they became evil, or exactly what their powers are, are fuzzy. Sometimes it seems like the paintings need to be in the room with someone to harm them, but other times they’re able to wreck their targets from miles away. Their powers range from limitless to strangely tame. There’s no terra firma here.

Don’t get me wrong, supernatural horror doesn’t need to be an exact science, but the good ones know how to establish a kind of baseline, a sense of what is and is not possible, and “Buzzsaw” really fails to do this. The result is that the paintings are so powerful that they’re basically God, and I’m not afraid of them. It sounds counter-intuitive, but making your evil entities too strong can reduce scariness. How can you build suspense if the audience has no idea what to be afraid of? Why root for people you know have no chance of survival?

There’s a profound sense that Gilroy’s heart just isn’t in the supernatural elements of the story. He puts off introducing them for a while, and once they show up, he does as little as he can to flesh them out. I think he knew he wanted two things: to visit the world of modern art, and to cause some murder and mayhem inside of it. For whatever reason, he decided evil paintings was his way in. I think he was wrong.

Imagine, if you will, a different “Velvet Buzzsaw.” Instead of a story about evil, magical paintings, imagine if it was a thriller about a serial killer who was using modern art pieces to kill his victims, many of whom were artists, curators and critics in the art world. I think this would’ve helped the movie in two ways…

1. It would’ve allowed Gilroy to keep his focus on the characters and world he was clearly so interested in, because a serial killer has a secret identity you can attempt to uncover by diving into the backstories and psychologies of your characters. Supernatural stuff, on the other hand, by definition requires you to leave the world you’re setting up and go create a different one: a creature, or a spirit, or whatever it is. It’s contradictory world building instead of supportive world building.
2. It would have more effectively commented on modern art. The evil paintings in “Buzzsaw” are an odd fit. I struggled to believe anyone in this world of GoPro sculptures and animatronic hobo superheroes would fall over themselves for the sake of glorified watercolor portraits. Furthermore, the movie is skewering MODERN art very specifically, and the evil paintings don’t share the foibles and eccentricities of modern art, so the critique feels lost. Lastly, there’s not much thematic resonance around these things. They’re just bad full stop, as beautiful to behold as they are lethal to anyone who profits from them. But such a simplistic “forbidden fruit” paradigm feels insubstantial when Gilroy went to the trouble of constructing this rich satire about the blurry line between good taste and arbitrary kingmaking. What do these devil paintings have to say about modern art? Kinda nothing. And the movie makes a mistake by insisting these paintings are objectively masterpieces, unanimously adored by everyone. Wouldn’t it have been more interesting for one person to decide that a collection of ghastly horrors is actually art, then watch the fallout as the world reacts, recoils, and absorbs that view?

I can’t shake the feeling that the supernatural elements of “Velvet Buzzsaw” sit on top of the other story beats, but don’t blend with them. I felt like I was watching a rich, funny satire that suddenly got T-boned by a villain from a whole different movie. It’s so random that the characters never get a handle on what’s happening to them, or what it means. I can’t really blame them.

Imagine if, instead, these deaths were the work of a crazed and anonymous serial killer who fancied themselves the ultimate post-modern artist. Now THAT I could see these characters sinking their teeth into. Some would be appalled, others cruelly dismissive, maybe a few might even indulge in some gallows humor and go along with it, “reviewing” each of the killer’s works. The story could actually ask some questions about what is art and isn’t. Who says killing can’t be made into art? And you’d have a whodunit on your hands, which would let you use this wonderful ensemble more thoroughly, since they’d all be suspects.

The more I think about this, the more sure I am that this is the final form of “Velvet Buzzsaw” which, for better or worse, eluded Gilroy. His nose for a story led him to an interesting world, delightful characters, and a vague notion that he wanted to wreck some havoc. All of those instincts were dead on, but he chose the wrong chaos agent. The result is a movie that is fun and fascinating but a little off. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but there was a classic hiding in here that got away.