Space Rocket Nation/Vendian/Bold/Kobal/Shutterstock"I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't write...no real talent. But I'm pretty, and I can make money off pretty."This moment in Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon gives us insight into its heroine, Jesse (Elle Fanning), a small-town Georgia girl who travels to Los Angeles in the hopes of becoming a model. Alongside her lack of real talent is a lack of anything passing for background or personality. Jesse's parents are gone (it's unclear whether they're wholly dead or not), and she comes to LA almost fully formed. She, like the other models she meets, is meant to be delineated into either "sex or food." And over the course of the film's near-two hour runtime, Jesse will quite literally become both.When The Neon Demon arrived in theaters in 2016, critics and audiences weren't quite sure how to take it. Where Refn's previous film, 2011's Drive, was a hyper-violent yet thrilling action drama, this was a maximalist examination of beauty standards and the world of modeling. Where critics had praised Drive, here they considered the movie exploitative, offensive, "ridiculous and puerile," to quote Glenn Kenny of the New York Times.Yet its giallo-inflected story of an angelic Alice in Wonderland lost in a sea of decadence and feasted upon by her competition came at a unique time in the world of femininity and beauty. As a 2026 article in Glamour lays out, "we were online in 2016 — but in a low-stakes way that allowed us to actually play with our hair and makeup. We didn’t think twice about our thick liquid eyeliner or dramatic cut creases. We were bold enough to wear matte lipsticks in shades like dark purple, fuchsia, and brown. We were naive enough to think that simply overlining our lips would magically give us a Kylie Jenner pout. In 2016 there were no concerns about being 'cringe' or 'cheugy.' Back then social media was forgiving in that way."Yet, in the world of The Neon Demon, social media isn't even a factor. Jesse's ascent to stardom comes the old-fashioned way, by connecting with a strange guy on the internet who wants to take her picture. Jesse's world is insulated entirely from the grander world around her. Whether she's in her crappy hotel room or the various restaurants and parties people congregate in, there's little interest in impressing anyone beyond the next photographer or director. That seems like the high fantasy of The Neon Demon, in that Jesse isn't looking for fans or followers. She doesn't see herself as a brand. She is simply a commodity, a woman trying to make money off exploiting the one feature she believes is valuable about herself: her face.Refn and co-screenwriters Mary Laws and Polly Stenham wade through the vapidity to manifest the ways that women are forced into a dog-eat-dog world of prioritizing beauty over everything. At the time, beauty was becoming a highly curated commodity online, one where the natural look was on its way out, but there was still a desire to cling to the belief that enhancing one's original features were the way to go. Jesse finds herself continually compared against Gigi (Bella Heathcoate), a veteran model who has undergone a variety of different surgeries to achieve the perfect look.Battle of the models. | Space Rocket Nation/Vendian/Bold/Kobal/ShutterstockThis is where Refn's film has, remarkably, aged better. It seems to have read the tea leaves of what we see now, where plastic surgery is considered preventative maintenance. In 2016, 17.1 million surgical and minimally invasive treatments performed, a 3 percent increase from the year before with Botox being the predominant treatment per the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Contrast that with 2025 where facial procedures surged alongside the use of GLP-1 weight loss pharmaceuticals and other attempts at body contouring. In today's landscape, though Jesse would still be perceived as utterly beautiful, one wouldn’t bat an eye at Gigi's various surgeries.Concurrently, there's something to be said about how The Neon Demon examines feminism and women in 2016 that, again, seems to have aged remarkably well. Today's cinematic landscape gives us movies like The Substance, which emphasize the horror of women being forced to grapple with aging in the public eye. As fellow model Sarah (Abbey Lee) tells Jesse, the women in their industry are forced to wonder who a woman is sleeping with to get ahead. "Who is she f*cking, and can she climb higher than me?" Jesse is not sleeping with anyone to get where she is, but she is routinely forced to show her body to photographers and generally be exploited to get ahead.In this case, the "f*cking" that Sarah is talking about isn't just literal, it's psychological and emotional. Knowing what we know now about the trafficking of young women, The Neon Demon lives in a liminal stage where it’s blatant about the ways girls are being abused — a teenage girl in the hotel room next door to Jesse's is assaulted in the night — and yet that is never brought out into the open. This being 2016, the movie chooses to focus more on the ingrained misogyny in women picking each other apart rather than the wider system that makes a profit on it.And much like The Substance, The Neon Demon also plays on the body horror that remains a popular element of genre. But where The Substance presents various iterations of Demi Moore's Elizabeth Sparkle (herself, her young doppleganger Sue, and eventually the monstrous Elisasue), The Neon Demon goes for more ritualistic and literal body horror. Sarah, Gigi, and Ruby (Jena Malone), acting like a cabal of witches, murder Jesse, bathing in her blood and eating parts of her. In a way, this moment acts as a spiritual bridge between this and The Substance. Where The Substance is more of an actual ouroboros, The Neon Demon has the community of women consuming and building off the essence of another, the model community essentially feeding off the bright dreams and vulnerability of the dozens of girls elevated and eventually cast aside.Ten years later, Refn and The Neon Demon are still relevant in how one can "make money off pretty." The distinction lies in what defines pretty and how that money is made. A far darker heart lies here than it did 10 years ago.The Neon Demon is streaming on Prime Video.