Review: Vox Lux

Directed by: Brady Corbet

Written by: Brady Corbet

Starring: Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Stacy Martin, Jennifer Ehle, Raffey Cassidy

Rating: [3.5/5]

Reckoning with the trauma of going through something horrific in one’s life can go in many directions as any psychologist will share with you. It creates for this mental and physical response that we may not see until it gets processed even years later. In Vox Lux we have the after-effects of something sitting with a popstar where instead of fully getting the opportunity to heal, our protagonist gets thrust right into the spotlight for her formative years. 

After surviving a horrific school shooting, Celeste (Natalie Portman), one of the survivors, sings a song to honor those who have fallen which skyrockets here her to fame. Now years later with a teenage daughter of her own, she finds difficulty in fully connecting and grounding herself as she finds her life marred by living in horrific events that somehow get tied to her no matter how much she wants to avoid them. 

Quite the enigma as a feature film, Vox Lux tells an unconventional story of a pop star who does not want to focus on her particular journey but how everything in her life leads around traumatic events not just personally, but also at a large scale. It starts out with a school shooting incident where she exists as one of the few survivors but each time jump in the story essentially occurs around something terrible happening around her and completely out of her control still having an impact on her psyche. The film seeks to inform while also attempting to sympathize making out Celeste as such a fascinating character to follow as we try to piece together how this impacts her. 

If anything, centering this film on these traumatic events speaks on the strange relationship these incidents have with artistic pursuits that make for quite a disconcerting observation. Here we have a girl rising to fame because of a song meant to inspire after she survived something terrible. Would she have risen up to fame if she did not live to sing about it? A grim question to ask but one the film directly poses, which then leads to the incident that happens in Croatia in Celeste’s adult years where the perpetrators dawn the masks worn in one of her music videos making her visually somewhat complicit in what transpired. It presents this cause-and-effect dynamic of trauma influencing art and the complete inverse. This push and pull navigate in a fairly messy way but one that certainly intrigues the way it operates through our central character and how Celeste fits in all of this. 

Following her around, played brilliantly by Natalie Portman, gives the appearance of an overly immature woman who cannot control her impulses and needs to be tended to like a child at times. At 31 years old she has a teenage daughter, indicating statutory rape she experienced led to a pregnancy. Therefore, she could not have a childhood because of her rise to fame and immediately jumped into the lifestyle of a pop star and being a teenage mother. It makes for a complete formula on what it takes to make for someone who does not have a firm grasp of reality and how she acts and therefore receives a lack of judgment on my part seeing as everything put together in this film all culminates in a situation I would not know how to handle and it all gets placed on this one person. This journey makes for a fascinating character study even if she appears unseemly in several moments as she serves as a byproduct of the world around her but still manages, when the time comes, to deliver in a professional manner that ultimately continues to lead to her continual success. 

Featuring some interesting songs, dazzling aesthetics, and a fascinating central character, Vox Lux does not operate as a typical look at the life of a musician. Instead of simply playing through the hits of Celeste’s life we have a story about how trauma and art have this inextricable link that never appears to sever for her. Natalie Portman does pretty well in balancing the strangeness of this character and making her utterly fascinating at the same time in the way she acts around those she loves and strangers alike. Truly something to marvel at as a bold project.