Parents' Guide to Velvet Buzzsaw

This is a strange hybrid of art house film, thriller, comedy, and horror movie; it's not always successful, but when it is, it really is. Velvet Buzzsaw is at its best when it's satirizing the art scene in all its excess (one of the best movies about this is the hard-to-find indie, (Untitled), which is highly recommended). Writer-director Dan Gilroy (of Nightcrawler and Roman J. Israel, Esq., both excellent films) has convincingly crafted a whole world, a whole vernacular. It's a realm of total absorption and self-absorption for many. One woman moans, "I'm through dating artists. They're already in a relationship." And when a critic is enraged at an artist for sleeping with his partner, he screams, "The admiration I had for your work ... has completely ... evaporated!" The ensemble cast is quite good, with Gyllenhaal playing an affected dandy who has actual principles, Russo effective as an ice-cold dealer, and John Malkovich perfectly cast as a somewhat-lost artist who's trying to find himself again. Natalia Dyer of Stranger Things is charming as a low-level assistant, a role that's something of a running joke.

But the film is less effective as a supernatural thriller. Its gimmick is nothing that horror fans won't have seen before, and the peril to which the characters are subjected isn't particularly scary or inventive. What makes it interesting, really, is the juxtaposition of some of these horror clichés and the rest of Velvet Buzzsaw's satirical art-film quality. It's not a great film, but it's weird and watchable.