Review: Only God Forgives

Only God Forgives. Well, the characters in Nicholas Winding Refn’s latest offering certainly don’t, due to their violent psychopathy. It certainly is a bizarre film, one of those that causes you to take a moment to readjust to reality afterward. After the first successful collaboration between Refn and leading man Ryan Gosling in Drive, this is their next, perhaps more ambitious, project.

If I were to compare Only God Forgives to Kubrik’s filmography, I’d say that it is a hybrid of Barry Lyndon’s aesthetic beauty and A Clockwork Orange’s brutal madness. The camera-work is incredible – every shot could be hung in the Louvre. There are fantasy sequences, cutaway scenes to parable-song-filled karaoke performances... and all that stuff. Don’t forget this is as much an art film as a Hollywood blockbuster. I should add that for anyone not keen on extreme violence, which hopefully should be the majority, watching this will be a task at points. There is more chopping and slicing than an episode Masterchef, more blood than a French steak, more guns than a bodybuilding competition. Although it’s all very powerful, and I guess that that’s a good thing, it is the type of production that will probably get people thinking whether the violence was necessary or just gratuitous. Like a Tarantino movie. Personally, I would say it was vital to the story, and so disgusting that there is nothing glamorous about it all. Good soundtrack, too.

The film centres on two American criminal brothers working in Bangkok, and when one is killed mother Crystal (Kristen Scott Thomas) comes to sort things out. She is not a nice person especially, pretty evil, and Gosling’s Julian is thoroughly disturbed, so much so that he barely speaks (Gosling must have had an easy time with learning his lines, both of them). This cues a collision course with a karaoke-singing policeman ‘The Angel of Vengeance’ (Vithaya Pansringarm), whose favourite mode of retribution is swift removal of recalcitrants’ arms via traditional sword. The plot is really very simple - there aren't a host of twists and turns that one might expect.

Is it, as people insisted on predicting, just Drive 2? Well, no, if a every repeated actor-director collaboration was a carbon copy then Scorsese and De Niro would have made eight Mean Streets and Hitchcock would have made four Suspicions. There are similarities, of course, but Gosling’s character is very different. This time, he isn’t a cardboard cut-out of a Man With No Name hero, he’s a disturbed and vulnerable young man.

There are numerous themes running throughout, such as Julian’s feeling of isolation and the nature of his mothering. They are presented in a complex way, through visions and dreams, enough to keep Freud occupied for days. Whether you enjoy it or not, and I did, it is stimulating stuff, and certainly not deserving of the trashing reviews that it has thus far received.