CANNES, May 20 — Eat or be eaten — that’s the message of The Neon Demon, a film about cannibal models with a scene of lesbian necrophilia that shocked Cannes and drew the loudest boos of the festival so far.

Starring Elle Fanning, the movie takes a look at the cutthroat fashion industry and women’s willingness to go to extremes to be considered beautiful.

“Beauty isn’t everything, it is the only thing,” says Fanning’s character, Jesse, a sweet teenage beauty with the “It” factor who sweeps aside a bevy of supermodels when she arrives in Los Angeles.

Others have to go under the scalpel to achieve their good looks, such as one perfectly-sculpted model who refers to herself as the bionic woman and says: “Plastics is simply good grooming.”

Their jealousy and desire for Jesse eventually leads them to murder and eat her.

Critics panned the latest film by Denmark’s Nicolas Winding Refn, who is best known for Drive and genre-bending, violent work which has earned him a cult following.

The Hollywood Reporter said it was a “stultifyingly vapid, ponderously paced allegorical critique of the modelling world whose seethingly jealous inhabitants can’t wait to literally chew each other up and spit each other out”. — AFP