Drive: Refn's Neon Fairy Tale With a Hammer

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Drive opens with a promise and then keeps it in a way almost no crime film dares. A getaway driver explains, in a flat monotone, the exact terms of his service — five minutes, anything happens in that window he is yours, a minute either side and he is gone — and then Nicolas Winding Refn films the getaway itself as a slow, patient, nerve-shredding game of hide-and-seek through night-time Los Angeles, more about stillness and timing than about speed. It tells you everything. This is a film about a man of absolute competence and almost no words, moving through a neon city with the poise of a knight, and it is going to make you wait for the violence and then punish you for wanting it.

Neo-Noir's Neon Problem: When Style Stands In for Substance

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 13:00:00 +0000

There is a particular image that neo-noir has spent the last fifteen years falling in love with. A lone figure, half-lit, standing in a corridor or a car or a hotel room bathed in aggressive magenta and cyan, holding a pose while a synthesiser throbs on the soundtrack. It is a gorgeous image. It has launched a thousand posters and ten thousand Instagram grids. And it is the exact point where the modern crime film keeps getting into trouble, because that image is doing so much work to feel meaningful that a filmmaker can forget to make it be meaningful. This is neon-noir’s central problem, and it is worth diagnosing precisely, because the same technique that produces the genre’s best recent work also produces its emptiest.

Nicolas Winding Refn - vo.rs

Drive: Refn's Neon Fairy Tale With a Hammer

Neo-Noir's Neon Problem: When Style Stands In for Substance