Culture

Rating: 2/5

The crime thriller genre is rarely graced with the artistic flair that Nicholas Winding Refn brings to his films, but his previous works Drive and Bronson are proof that it can be done well. His latest film Only God Forgives, however, is an example of it being done very poorly.

Only God Forgives is set in Thailand, and tells the story of an American family of drug kingpins whose son is killed by the Thai authorities: a great premise which is unfortunately butchered in execution. Though the film is a standard 90 minutes, it probably has less than five minutes of dialogue, and consists mainly of long, drawn-out shots of people walking or staring deeply into the dark corners of a room.

The result is a film full of needlessly violent, unlikeable characters with indiscernible motives and inscrutable emotions. Only God Forgives has a very basic revenge plot, but the content is often so weird or unfathomable that the film ends up as a confusing and absurd mess. For example, the protagonist/ antagonist (God only knows with this film) spends much of the movie butchering people with a sword, during which there are several cutaways to him singing Thai songs in a karaoke bar to a solemn faced crowd of officers.

The film stars the much loved Ryan Gosling, but even this handsome devil was not enough to save it. Every actor performs with such robotic rigidity that even the charismatic Gosling ends up looking like a hack actor.

Despite the film itself being fairly terrible, the cinematography is beautiful. This movie has a strange and lurid visual tone which, despite the terrible narrative, at least makes it nice to look at. It is overwhelmingly violent, and while this would have worked better had it contributed to a good narrative, the brutal and visceral nature of this violence is at least exquisitely portrayed.

If you are thinking of seeing this to satiate your Gosling obsession, I’d wait till his next film.