Vox Lux (Brady Corbet, 2018)

I don't get it. I was all with this at the beginning - the combination of a high school shooting with the birth of a pop star seemed a reasonable premise, there seemed to be quite a lot of interest going on cinematographically, and Raffey Cassidy's performance had an intriguing inscrutability that seemed to offer any number of possible future directions for the narrative. And then it all started to go wrong with a crushingly banal but supposedly edgy visit to a rock concert, and from that point on the film proceeded methodically to evacuate itself of all interest. Natalie Portman's performance as Cassidy's adult self is in many ways remarkable, but her character is beyond cliché. I wondered if things would perk up when Cassidy appeared again, this time as Portman's daughter, but I couldn't spot anything interesting that the film actually does with this. By the end we learn that pop stars are self-indulgent and hypocritical, but that people quite like their music and sometimes it means a lot to them emotionally even if it is pretty trashy. Which is not quite what I'd call revelatory... The film does also make some stabs at black humour, but they mostly fall pretty flat. It's of course possible that I've missed something, that I was just watching it all wrong, but the chief problem is that once it gets going most of the film - as well as being banal - is, quite simply, boring. And I don't think "that's the point!" cuts it as a plausible explanation.