Art will kill you in the Vel­vet Buz­z­saw trailer

Dan Gilroy scored a hit with his direc­to­r­i­al debut Night­crawler, a psy­chothriller that rode the cap­ti­vat­ing insta­bil­i­ty of a Jake Gyl­len­haal on the edge to a hand­some box-office pay­day, gen­er­ous praise from the press, and awards con­sid­er­a­tion. His fol­low-up, the legal dra­ma Roman J Israel, did… not do that. Den­zel Wash­ing­ton earned a baf­fling-to-many Oscar nom­i­na­tion, but the crit­ics were frosty and a lot of peo­ple lost a lot of money.

So it’s the career-smart move for Gilroy to reteam with Gyl­len­haal and return to the reg­is­ter of hys­te­ria for his third go in the director’s chair, the upcom­ing Vel­vet Buz­z­saw. Pri­or to the film’s world pre­mière at Sun­dance lat­er this month, Net­flix has uploaded a sur­re­al, hor­ror-tinged trail­er promis­ing more of the mad­ness that brought Gilroy to prominence.

A string of mur­ders and more abstract acts of vio­lence play out in the com­pet­i­tive art col­lect­ing cir­cuit, a dog-eat-dog game fuelled by pre­ten­sion and con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion. Gyl­len­haal por­trays a col­lec­tor (appar­ent­ly named Morf) enam­oured of new­ly dis­cov­ered works from an unknown artist, said to have syn­the­sized the strik­ing reds of his paint using human blood. (Note: Gilroy pur­loined this from Her­schell Gor­don Lewis’ 1965 film Col­or Me Blood Red.)

He’s joined by Toni Col­lette as a rival buy­er, John Malkovich and Dav­eed Dig­gs as artists in vogue, and the always-fun Bil­ly Mag­nussen as anoth­er one of these cul­tur­al gatekeepers.

Art satires can some­times resort to easy pot­shots about haugh­ti­ness and obses­sion with sta­tus trump­ing actu­al appre­ci­a­tion – more facile ver­sions of the but­ton con­clud­ing the trail­er, about a mur­der that acci­den­tal­ly goes viral when patrons assume it’s an instal­la­tion. Hope­ful­ly, the throt­tling mon­key-arms and oth­er flour­ish­es of insan­i­ty will set it apart from the rest of the chin-stroking pack.

Vel­vet Buz­z­saw will arrive on Net­flix in the US on 1 February.