From his very first feature on, Nicolas Winding Refn has established a flair for making hyper-violent movies that are nonetheless stylish and beautiful. With his last two films, Bronson and Drive, however, he also showed that if he had a first-rate actor anchoring his artistry with a showy performance, he could also make movies engaging enough to appeal to broad, international audiences. His latest film, Only God Forgives, reunites him with his Drive star, Ryan Gosling, and moves the action to Thailand, where Gosling is playing a fight promoter of some sort who is tasked by his domineering mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) with avenging the death of his sadistic brother (Tom Burke), which occurred at the hands of a man whose young daughter he raped and killed, but happened at the behest of a psychotic vigilante of sorts named Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm).
That sounds like the makings of a pretty exciting story—I know—but in practice Only God Forgive’s plot develops so slowly that one could call it dramatically inert. Despite Gosling’s involvement, this is much closer to Refn’s brutal, abstract Viking story, Valhalla Rising, than it is anything else he’s done. Also, one of the big aspects of Drive that caught people’s attention was the minimalism of Gosling’s performance and how smoldering the lengthy silences his character sat in became; but this time around Refn pushes the silences for so long and gives Gosling’s character so little to be engaged by (other than a vague, doomed fate that seems to be pushing him toward fighting an authority figure), that every once in a while you want to put a mirror under his nostrils just to make sure he’s still alive. Thomas’ character can pretty blatantly be described as a bitch, and she gets to chew quite a bit of scenery in order to establish that, but all of the others are so vaguely defined and frustratingly underdeveloped that you never really even get a sense of what their roles in this criminal underworld are, or what led them into becoming the types of people they are. Ultimately, the loose narrative just seems like an undercooked excuse for Refn to experiment with evocative visuals and moody music.
Of course, as all of the people who have spent the past year tooling around listening to the Drive soundtrack while wearing satin jackets will tell you, Refn is pretty god dang effective when it comes to marrying evocative visuals with moody music, so even when Only God Forgives is boring you with inaction or asking you to draw meaning out of too much vagary, it’s still always entrancing to look at. And any movie that served to introduce me to the aesthetic pleasures of looking at gorgeous Thai singer/actress Yayaying Rhatha Phongam can’t be all bad, even if it’s unsuccessful overall. Any fans of experimental filmmaking, glowing blood red color palettes, subtext involving hands, framing scenes through doorways, or Cliff Martinez’s music should at least give Only God Forgives a try. But everyone else should probably stay away—especially those who would watch it expecting another charismatic performance from the uncharacteristically sleepy Gosling.
