Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Velvet Buzzsaw.
There’s a certain trap that’s apparent to anyone writing or reading a review of Velvet Buzzsaw. Dan Gilroy’s 2019 satirical horror eviscerates the gatekeepers of the art gallery scene first figuratively and then literally. Its characters are arrogant, preening, and self-obsessed, but none more than Morf Vandewalt. An egotistic reviewer with a taste for red meat, Morf is out to make artists wither beneath his practised pen. Velvet Buzzsaw seems to be daring any critic who sinks their teeth into it to display the same pretention towards it that Morf does towards his subjects, which creates a dilemma for anyone who might want to discuss high-minded aesthetics in relation to the film or who might want to point out a few bumps and scratches on it. None of us wants to be Morf. However, by showing us what a horrible critic looks like, Velvet Buzzsaw gives us an idea of what a helpful critic might do, approaching a piece of entertainment by being empathetic and helping others rather than being vicious and aiming to make yourself look esteemed. So keep in mind that as we pick apart Gilroy’s drama, that’s the mindset I’m going in with. I’m not here to tear anyone down but to alternately praise and respectfully disagree with aspects of Velvet Buzzsaw, and with any luck, to inform an audience with an interest in it. Feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if you’ve seen the film.
It goes like this: Rhodora Haze is a a former anarchist punk rocker turned cold-hearted curator. She even still has a tattoo of the logo of her old band: Velvet Buzzsaw. She runs a gallery named after her for which she has recently acquired an installation called Sphere, a metallic blob with various openings through which museumgoers can see and feel differing sights and sensations. As she’s debuting Sphere, her colleague Morf slings some mud at another exhibit at the show. The exhibit under the axe is Hoboman: an animatronic satire of America’s supposed golden age. Meanwhile, up-and-coming art buyer at The Haze, Josephina, stumbles on a ripe opportunity to impress Rhodora when she finds a painter, Vetril Dease, dead, and steals his haunting body of work. Dease was without friends or family, and as we will later learn, wanted his art destroyed upon the event of his death. But Josephina has other plans: she agrees with The Haze’s legal team to lie and maintain the front that she found the pictures in a dumpster. In an internal monologue, Morf confirms the genius of Dease and explains the raw anguish captured in his paintings as the product of Dease’s childhood abuse.
Rival curator Jon Dondon visits acclaimed artist Piers to bathe in the light of his latest work, but Piers is, as ever, standoffish to a member of the local art scene, and is going through a creative dry spell. With public interest in Dease building, Dondon later tries to clue the press into Dease’s mysterious background in return for a fee and is killed under supernatural circumstances. A similar death befalls Bryson, a gallery worker who tries to steal a Dease, and Gretchen, who negotiates to have Dease’s magnum opuses displayed at the city gallery. At Dondon’s funeral, a mourner tells Morf that his hatchet job on Hoboman prevented it from finding a home in a gallery and that it is now gathering dust in a warehouse. Morf begins having terrifying hallucinations and eventually works out that it’s Dease’s paintings causing his mental collapse and the deaths in the art world. He tries to shut the pieces away in a storage facility, but there Hoboman stalks and murders him. Most of the other characters connected to Dease also meet a grisly end, but I’ll leave the details as a treat for later.
Velvet Buzzsaw delights in its ingenious death scenes, but it’s more than a Final Destination with the Florida elite. The victims in this film are all obsessed with art being commodified, evaluated, and displayed. Josephina asks what the point of the art is if nobody sees it and Morf says he elevates the medium through his reviews. Dease is the philosophical opposite. He created his art in private, away from prying eyes, and he doesn’t want it publicly displayed or critiqued; he wants it to stay a hidden expression of his pain. In the clash between the museum moguls and Dease, there’s also a conflict between art with and without substance.
Early on, the film gives us the impression that despite Morf and company treating the art they favour as hopelessly profound, there’s nothing to speak of behind that pretence. When the cast say that certain creations touch on themes of desire or economics, the pieces often seem only tangentially related or unrelated to those topics. The film also conveys the vacuousness of these characters’ appraisals through its visuals. At one point, we see Morf staring towards the camera dewy-eyed over a Dease, talking about going “beyond criticism” and turning the spiritual into the real, but as we never see the piece of art he’s talking about, and there’s nothing to connect his critique back to, the statements feel empty. Sphere is supposedly a work of unparalleled artistic value, but again, that value never materialises to the audience. Characters place their arms into Sphere and gaze into its cavities, but we don’t see or feel what they do. Rhodora Haze’s name, which she also gives to her gallery, refers to a weather phenomenon that obscures, and the term “hazy” refers to vaguery. The film quietly comments that the art these characters have bonded with (Dease aside) doesn’t clarify anything about the human experience and that Morf doesn’t illuminate anything meaningful in the art. Ironically, the first words in the film come from a neon sign at Rhodora’s show which reads “There’s no confusion in my house”.
To listen to these characters, you’d think the pieces are daring; Rhodora says that “All art is dangerous” and the tattoo on her wrist reads “No Death No Art”, yet never does any of the art seem to pose a danger to them. It is effortlessly catalogued, contained, and explained by the characters, and them doing so helps keep them in a lifestyle of plush comfort. This is the crux of it: These art buffs want the implication of something dangerous but with the safety of luxury behind it; they want a velvet buzzsaw. Dease upends their lives because rather than having the waft of some profound expression around his work, his paintings are an authentic materialisation of human emotion, and so, in a literal sense, become viscerally dangerous to the curators and the critics.
Instead of the characters keeping up an arrogant emotional distance from the work they purchase and opine on, they are forced to experience the same torture Dease did. For example, Jon Dondon is hung by his tie and Bryson is ripped apart by a pack of monkeys who live in one of Dease’s pictures. These deaths are foreshadowed not just by the statements from Rhodora that I mentioned but also through Morf’s soundbite about the spiritual becoming real and Piers’s passing observation that his studio is a slaughterhouse. Velvet Buzzsaw critiques a school of art that is absurdly meta and a community of art appreciators whose relationship to it is a vacuum of abstraction. It says that despite these people appointing themselves the guardians of artistic taste, if they ever absorbed authentic art into their diet, it would be anathema to them and destroy their community. But in places, the film is guilty of the same behaviour that it skewers its characters for.
The slasher genre is often reliant on victims committing sins to earn them their suffering and deaths. Maybe they bullied another character, or they tried to take a relic from sacred ground. In Velvet Buzzsaw, the moral transgressions of the future victims are on display for all to see. Josephina stole the Dease and hides that fact, Rhodora is rapacious and cruel, Jon Dondon is disingenuous, and the gallery hand Bryson oversteps romantic boundaries with female colleagues, but what did Morf do wrong? It’s not that there’s not an answer to the question, but investigating it gets down to the grimier elements of this script. Morf is about as superficial and passive-aggressive a person as you can imagine. To give two of many examples of this, he arrogantly shuts down someone’s appreciation of Hoboman at the start of the film while unconvincingly claiming that he still respects their opinion, and when his optician gives him special glasses to protect his eyes from the light, he complains that they’re unfashionable.
Morf is also bisexual, and the vapidness and cattiness that he displays are stereotypical traits of non-hetero men. So the immorality of Morf becomes intertwined in his queer coding. Additionally, near the start of the film, he has a boyfriend called Ed who he casually discards out of boredom to start a sexual relationship with Josephina, and this may reinforce his shallowness, but it also plays into discriminatory prejudices about bi people being promiscuous, unfaithful partners. Until the Dease massacre, Morf is a black hole for empathy, but the film also fails to adequately sympathise with others by playing the femininity and sexuality of its bi character for derision. It also makes it harder to believe that Morf “deserves” his death for displaying this behaviour because that seems all too close to agreeing that Morf is owed his murder for having traits associated with queer men.
It’s also the case that while Morf appears to be uninformative and self-serving in his early criticisms, when he explains how Dease’s paintings came to be, describing the sublimation of suffering into art, he appears as an intelligent person capable of saying insightful things about the work he analyses. This overrides our earlier perception of him and makes him less of a fair candidate for the chopping block. You might reasonably say the explainer shouldn’t be part of the script, but it’s the kind of thing that’s surprisingly hard to cut out. We need background on Dease to understand why he’d be a celebrated artist and why his work would be sought-after, but Dease can’t deliver it because he’s dead and nobody close to him can because he has no surviving friends and family. What’s more, he painted in reclusion.
You also can’t change those aspects of the script because we need there not to be anyone who could stand up for Dease and prevent the display of his pictures. You could have Dease be less private about his work, but his hermeticism is essential to the commentary the film is making. You could have scenes that take place before Dease’s death that show us his backstory, but the script would be at risk of being hypocritical by putting Dease’s life on public display the same way that the managers of the galleries do. These scenes would also be likely to impinge on the film’s tone as an absurd satire. Velvet Buzzsaw could introduce a more empathetic critic than Morf to explain Dease, but its point is that there is a critical bankruptcy in the for-profit art world and adding that character would work against that message. Additionally, it would be one more player in an already crowded hall. So the scene stays in, and when the curtain closes on act one, we still have little what makes Morf such a horrid critic.
There is that scene at Jon Dondon’s funeral when Morf learns that his review scuppered Hoboman’s chances at display and there’s an earlier interaction where he learns that a scathing critique of his encouraged a man to drive drunk and crash his car, putting him in a coma. In both cases, he makes no effort to relate to the suffering artists. However, I don’t believe that the world would be a better place if every critic positively reviewed every piece they saw or that someone operates a car drunk without other significant problems in their life. But after four false starts, we do learn of a habit Morf has that is unequivocally immoral and that the film doesn’t append to his sexuality. When he goes to preview an exhibit that consists of a chorus of whale song played through hanging speakers, he undergoes the agony of hearing his own reviews read back to him. When we hear the content of those texts, we get an essential new piece of information about Morf: He isn’t just condescending or rude, he’s an outright bully. The tone and language in his reviews are harassing. At last, we have a charge on Morf that sticks, but this is thirty minutes from the end of a picture that has spent an hour trying to establish Morf as a character. We barely come to understand his depravity before he’s having his neck snapped in a storage facility. And for as safe as these characters may play it in their art, I can’t help but feel that Velvet Buzzsaw also takes fewer risks in its third act.
Morf’s shift into a character we can relate to on some level keeps the film compelling, and how the characters die is shocking, creative, and makes statements, but that they die isn’t. At the end of the second act, the audience is going to comfortably predict that Dease’s curse will hunt down the critics and curators one by one, and that’s exactly what happens. Without the sense that the plot could skew the other way, the tension is somewhat lost. Most horrors preserve the feeling of stakes in the third act by having the main characters do something to fight back against the monsters, and having it, at first, succeed. Then there is either the glee of seeing the protagonist defeat evil or the dreadful last minute realisation that their efforts were futile. Velvet Buzzsaw is more than smart enough to know this and has Morf publish a scathing review of Dease’s paintings and then attempt to move them into storage in a gambit to save his life. However, it fails to drum up too much drama this way because we never see these methods working, barely see them enacted on screen, and again, they zoom by like a car on the motorway.
You could have this dramatic build as Morf realises that if his words have the power to hurt and ruin in the art scene, then they could also have the potential to help and ward people away from something negative. There is, in Morf’s arc, a kernel of him going from the groanworthy elitist critic to the platonic ideal of one, but the film communicates this third-act twist entirely through a few words of a phone call before rushing Morf to his final resting place. Maybe it was tough for the filmmakers to do anything else while keeping the pacing up, and perhaps a reprieve for Morf would have been too gentle for a film this cynical, but either way, I wish our investment in this character paid off better.
Having said that, I have a lot of respect for the symbolism in Josephina and Rhodora’s deaths. Josephina wanders into an art gallery that has appeared from thin air to find paint overtaking her, and becomes a painting: a piece of screaming graffiti art sprayed onto a concrete wall. Josephina is metaphorically and literally lost in the art; she becomes a two-dimensional person absorbed so much into the aesthetic that the real her is no longer extant. Rhodora’s third act actually plays out a little more like Morf’s should with her having her house stripped of Deases like someone having a home fumigated for bugs. As she sits in her empty garden, the sawblade tattoo on the back of her neck, which bears the name of her old punk band, spins up and burrows right through her. Rhodora may have tried to leave her rebel past behind, but after being refamiliarised with counter-cultural art in the form of Dease’s work, the anarchist part of her revolts against who she is now. It’s also a moment of horror writing that can catch even the most experienced of genre fans out. Rhodora is surrounded by nothing and no one in the seconds before her death, so there’s no perceivable threat to her, and yet the method of her demise is still something well-justified in the narrative.
I want to leave you with a moment in which the film uncharacteristically stays its hand, and in doing so shows an aspirational figure in the art world. The final scene, which plays into the credits, has Piers walking on the beach, using a stick to trace sweeping curves into the sand. While Piers in all his rudeness might seem like he should be next on the reaper’s list, the only people he sneers at are the art critics, dealers, and curators that the film condemns, and he resists contributing to their world by failing to produce any art for Dondon. He values honest interaction over the duplicity of his contemporaries, even if it is impolite, and he is the only person who, upon encountering the Deases, appears to emotionally connect with them fully. He’s not thinking about how he might use them as a leg up in his social circle or how to hawk them to the next buyer. Where everyone else needs their art to be spectated, and fawned over, and commented on, Piers has managed to embrace Dease’s mindset. His art at the shoreline will be washed away by the approaching tides, seen by no one but him, created for its own sake. Thanks for reading.
