Netflix: Immerse Yourself in the Insane Trailer for Velvet Buzzsaw. The online streaming app’s latest movie is an interesting mix of horror, satire, and LA’s dubious art scene.
From the writer and director of renowned thriller Nightcrawler, Netflix’s upcoming film Velvet Buzzsawis releasing next month in February after acclaiming praise at Sundance, and its evocative two minute trailer offers a haunting glance of the new film. [The movie stars Jake Gyllenhaal – who played the lead in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler – as well as Rene Russo, Zawe Ashton, and names many may recognize, like Stranger Things’ Natalia Dyer, Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs, and Hereditary’s Toni Collette.
The trailer opens with Gyllenhaal putting on a pair of glasses, examining something closely in the typical snobby art critic uniform and saying: “critique is so limiting and emotionally draining”. Throughout the first fifty seconds of the video you might notice that it looks rather mundane, considering its upbeat, sassy music, more of a look into LA’s supercilious art scene – this is the part in a horror movie you may recognize as the beginning where the family moves into an old house in an isolated part of a new neighborhood – but it’s only until the scene where the death of a painter is shown when things begin to feel strange. It’s here where the greed filled art world takes an unexpected supernatural twist.
It’s easy to get confused as to why the film is dubbed as a satirical thriller when prominent elements of horror are shown throughout the trailer, but the whole parameter of Velvet Buzzsaw is more than just something seemingly normal gone wrong. The supernatural part in the film isn’t random; it’s not “out of the blue”. It’s something of a metaphor of the greed that comes out of art colliding with commerce, two things that often don’t seem to go hand in hand. The satire is seen in the art itself. It’s as if the art is getting its revenge against those who let ugly money get in the way of their true beauty.
Velvet Buzzsaw will air on Netflix on February 1, 2019. (Text Jordinna Joaquin)