Ryan Gosling makes this face for 90 minutes and then the movie ends.
In a recent interview with Amos Barshad of Grantland, Nicolas Winding Refn, the director of 2011’s Drive and recent release Only God Forgives, summed up the difference between his last two movies with a Lou Reed analogy: Drive was like Transformer, Reed’s pop breakthrough that features hits like “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Perfect Day” and “Satellite of Love.” Both were milestones that introduced their creators to a mainstream audience while retaining much of the weirdness that made Reed and Refn cult and critical standbys to begin with.
Only God Forgives, in Refn’s estimation, is more like Reed’s infamous Metal Machine Music: atonal, bleak, and punishingly non-commercial, a strident rejection of any popular or mainstream instincts. No one could say Reed made any compromises with that album.
At the same time, no one could say Metal Machine Music was very good, either. (That is, no one but posers, the deaf or the most die-hard of die-hard Reed fans.) Only God Forgives is much the same. It’s idiosyncratic and personal but also a giant middle finger to conventional notions of entertainment.
Drive was a love story with car chases, a muted but thrilling tale of a stoic getaway driver finding redemption in a single mother’s love. Only God Forgives, on the other hand, is a pure revenge movie — a nihilistic film about grief and guilt and men who are brutal to each other and worse to women — that unfolds slowly, with minimal dialogue and lots of quiet, abstract nightmares shot in Lynchian blacks and reds. If Drive was The Fast and the Furious with a brain and a sense of style, then Only God Forgives is like an arthouse movie someone drenched in blood and left chained up in a Bangkok basement for 10 years.
Refn muse Ryan Gosling (Gangster Squad) plays Julian, a drug smuggler who runs a boxing ring in Thailand with his brother. Having evidently decided his performance in Drive was too expressive, Gosling limits himself to about 30 lines of dialogue and one facial expression in the entire film; he’s less a character than a scowl with Oedipal issues.
Lazy Freudianism has been the bane of many a terrible psychological thriller, but Julian’s mommy issues are the most interesting aspect of the film. Crystal, the mother, played by the usually staid and dignified French-English actress Kristin Scott Thomas (In the House), is the film’s breakout character, a brutally unsentimental alpha mom with a taste for vengeance, bad makeup and phrases such as “cum dumpster” and “yellow n—–.”
She arrives in Thailand after Julian’s older brother — and her favorite son — Billy is murdered by the father of an underage prostitute he raped and murdered. (“I’m sure he had his reasons,” Crystal deadpans.) Crystal wants the man who killed her son dead. Julian isn’t so sure he deserves it. Meanwhile, a local cop with an Old Testament sense of justice and a fondness for garish karaoke renditions of Thai folk songs stalks the shadows, punishing wrongdoing with karate and a sword.
That sounds like the setup to a kooky, blood-spattered B-movie — especially when you throw in Julian and Billy’s Muay Thai obsession — but Refn is much more interested in stylized imagery and building an atmosphere of dread punctuated by moments of grotesque ultraviolence than he is in traditional genre thrills. Consider yourself warned: Gosling spends a whole lot of time staring at a symbolically dark doorway and very little time beating the crap out of gangsters. (In fact, Gosling spends more time receiving beatings than giving them.)
Only God Forgives is too restrained and contemplative to work as a thriller but not insightful enough to work as a psychological character study. Rather than revealing character through action or dialogue, Refn chooses to obliquely suggest Julian’s guilty conscience by having him blankly stare at things. He’s a cipher, not a character, but Refn hopes that if he surrounds him with enough arresting imagery we won’t notice the void at the center of the film.
The imagery is arresting — although it sometimes feels like some production assistant only remembered to pack a red light filter and consequently the whole film had to be shot in hues of crimson and scarlet — but it’s arresting in the way an advertisement can be arresting, a glossy sheen with nothing beneath it. There’s the suggestion of substance, but try and grab it and you’ll find it’s just a smokescreen with nothing behind it.
There are a few standout moments — such as a dinner between Crystal, Julian and the prostitute Julian is dating that functions as a master class in dry humor — but, ultimately, Only God Forgives has very little to offer beyond exquisitely photographed ultraviolence, and the world hardly needs any more of that. At the end of the day, it’s a pretty film about ugly people that has no idea what it wants to say about them.
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