Film Review - Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

Velvet Buzzsaw is the new Netflix film written and directed by Dan Gilroy who made Nightcrawler back in 2014, the story here concerns an art critic (Jake Gyllenhaal) and some other people who work in art galleries in LA (Rene Russo, Toni Collette, John Malkovich among others) when they discover some art in an apartment and put it on sale, little do they know that the art might have sinister intentions.

Velvet Buzzsaw has some good visuals that look great in 4K be it the night sky, the lights of Los Angeles and the weird and wacky art installations and there is also a great performance by Toni Collette who seems to be on a real roll lately with this and her work in Hereditary which garnered great praise last year and she just knows how to play this kind of shallow bitchy character and still have great fun while doing so.

But fun was something I did not have while watching it as I hated this movie and its main culprit is the script, firstly the storytelling is deathly dull and while there is some fun bloody violence to be had I just didn’t really care all that much this time around and a lot of the scenes felt like they just dragged on and on and on while the characters talked about sweet nothing.

This leads me nicely to my second point which is the vast majority of the characters, they are so god damned insufferable to watch for the vast amount of the films running time and this film has some world class talent in it like Mr Gyllenhaal, Ms Russo, Mr Malkovich and all of them are so boring to watch as they are stuck with this leaden dialogue and ponderous characterization that I didn’t even enjoy seeing them die a terrible, terrible death.

And lastly the dialogue is so full of itself you can practically smell the pretension all around it, again huge amounts of this movie’s run time are devoted to people spouting utter nonsense that sounds like it’s a goddamn alien language and after a while I just kept thinking “Could Someone Please Talk Like a Normal Person” and I just felt like giving up on this whole bloody film by the end of it all.

Then again why am I surprised as increasingly it feels like unless it’s a filmmaker like Alfonso Curaron or the Coen Brothers, Netflix has just turned into the new dumping ground for either straight to video movies or the kind of films that so intrigue their makers yet studios quite rightly say “Nope we’re not making this” and if they want to play with the big boys of the movie studios its high time they started to behave like one and not just doll out cash to anyone who wants to make a film and not take any kind of studio note because as much as people hate on them sometimes they exist for a damn reason.

And so that was Velvet Buzzsaw and Netflix for the 2nd year running puts out the first genuine dud of a year last year it was Mute by Duncan Jones this year its this movie, 1 out of 5.