Velvet Buzzsaw
Final Destination meets the Turner Prize
Nightcrawler is a modern classic, so the prospect of Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, and writer/director Dan Gilroy re-teaming for an art world satire on Netflix and throwing in buckets of blood may seem hard to resist. But Buzzsaw is neither a sharp-enough takedown of the pompous LA art community, nor scary enough to satisfy as a horror.
The setup is straight out of a cautionary fable: a gallery assistant happens upon a hoard of paintings by an undiscovered artist. But the artist is dead and he’s left instructions to burn his life’s work. Naturally the flames are not forthcoming, and the people who profit from his work, including Gyllenhaal’s trend-setting critic, and a trio of competing agents, start dying under grisly circumstances.
There’s a touch of the Final Destinations to this setup. But where that series delighted with a gleefully elaborate procession of executions, Buzzsaw is bizarrely tame, only a couple of kills sticking in the memory. It works better as a performance piece; Gyllenhaal and Toni Collette play enjoyably grotesque creations. But there are at least three characters too many (John Malkovich has a nothing role), and only one extended anecdote about the public mistaking a brutal crime scene for a work of art really feels cutting.
An interesting experiment, then, but Nightcrawler is the one to watch. Jordan Farley