Velvet Buzzsaw Review

Dan Gilroy wrote two films here and stapled them together. One is a satire of the Los Angeles art market that knows exactly what it is looking at, populated by people who can price a canvas at a glance and cannot say one true sentence about it. Gyllenhaal is very funny in that film as Morf Vandewalt, a critic who appraises his own bedroom, passes judgment on a coffin, and holds every vowel half a second too long. Rene Russo and Toni Collette are just as good at the transactional smile.

The other film is a horror picture in which the art kills people, and it is inert. The deaths are written as punchlines and staged as scares, so the Hoboman robot and the gas station gallery land as neither. Worse, the rules never settle. The paintings choose victims by a logic the script invents scene by scene, which drains the back half of any dread at all. Robert Elswit lights the white rooms with a cold cleanliness that works. The satire has real observation in it, particularly about how fast grief gets converted into inventory, and it keeps being interrupted by a monster movie with no monster worth the name.