Velvet Buzzsaw review: Gory art world romp could almost pass for a flawed masterpiece

Dir: Dan Gilroy; Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Zawe Ashton, Toni Colette; 113 mins

The golden age of bonkers horror movies is gloriously evoked by Netflix’s latest feature length presentation. Beginning as a satire of the arts world, Velvet Buzzsaw swiftly and gleefully descends into a savage splatter-fest, smeared in paint, viscera and garishly-bright blood. It’s a camp riot – icky rather than scary, its tableaux of gruesome deaths arranged with a gallerist’s eye.

Having previously collaborated Jake Gyllenhaal in his scuzzy portrayal of kerb-hugging LA paparazzi, Nightcrawler, write/director Dan Gilroy has once again penned a script brimming with thoroughly unredeemable characters. Gyllenhaal’s Morf Vandewalt – an anagram or in-joke surely – is a preening, sexually ambiguous art critic whom we first encounter at the predictably ludicrous Miami Art Basel fair.

Portrayed with just the hint of a wink by Gyllenhaal, he is morally hideous, an aesthete who turns sniffy at a funeral because the coffin is too bright a shade of orange. But he is matched for nitro-fuelled malignancy by Rene Russo’s power-player gallery dealer Rhodora Haze and by her upwardly mobile protege Josephina (Zawe Ashton), with whom Morf has soon begun a relationship.

All three are drawn into a supernatural mystery when Josephina’s neighbour is discovered dead and revealed to have been an unheralded outsider artist with a stash of gruesome paintings. The pieces, by this mysterious “Vetril Dease”, are murky and ugly – and naturally an instant sensation.

They are also cursed and, one by one, those in the orbit of the canvases meet a sticky demise. One unfortunate gets more than they bargain for when inserting their hand into an “interactive” exhibit. Another is literally dragged face first into one of Dease’s feral portraits.

As cultural lampooning, Velvet Buzzsaw is as clunking as the huge, Richard Serra-esque sculpture that at one point almost crushes Rhodora. The message –that the art world is venal and two-faced, populated by the over-sexed, and grotesquely insecure – lands like a sledgehammer through a windscreen.

Rather than satire, it works best as murderous lark. Gilroy, brother of Jason Bourne franchise custodian Tony, deploys considerable guile as he cranks up the body-count. Streams of colour absorb a screaming woman, like a horrible waterfall. A victim, lying in their own, pooling viscera, is mistaken for a daring exhibit, so that children are allowed cavort in the blood.

The director is clearly having a hoot, as is Gyllenhaal who plays Vandewalt as a lidless absurdity. Russo, meanwhile, is grippingly reptilian as a one-time subversive rocker – Velvet Buzzsaw was her barricades-rushing punk band – gone over to the corporate dark side.

There are smaller parts for Toni Collette as a grasping art curator, John Malkovich as a painter who has finally understood that the only interesting thing about himself is his alcoholism and Stranger Things’ Natalia Dyer as a timid secretary sucked into the horror story.

A malevolent painting is not an original idea (as anyone kept awake all night after reading Lovecraft’s Pickman’s Model with testify). Nor, as already stated, does Velvet Buzzsaw have much novel or insightful to impart about international art or the triumph of commerce over creativity. But Gilroy marshals a hackneyed premise with tremendous verve and the boggle-eyed ingenuity of the limb-lopping and jugular-slicing has an addictive quality. Squint and this gory romp could almost pass for a flawed masterpiece.

Velvet Buzzsaw is out on Netflix now