Plot
Exiled American Julian Thompson (Ryan Gosling) is the proprietor of a Bangkok fighting club that masquerades as a cover for his family’s drug distribution business. After his brother Billy (Tom Burke) is killed in revenge for murdering a prostitute, Julian’s mother Crystal (Kristen Scott Thomas) flies in to the country to oversee her family’s own vengeance. However, the murders have also drawn the attention of police chief Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm) who deals justice with a supernatural proficiency.
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| There's red in these pictures. There's red everywhere. Red |
Review
Enigma is a powerful tool, but it can also be an actively distancing one if over or misused. While Only God Forgives tells you next-to-nothing time and again, with the contextual validity of every scene and shot questionable and contentious, it still remains utterly engrossing. Perplexingly so. The only thing sparser than dialogue from start to finish is the fuzzy warmth of human affection: scenes linger languidly; shots bare on for what should be discomfortingly long periods of time; images smash edit into one another with little reason and less explanation. The entire production is an aesthetically dichotomous trip-out seemingly designed exclusively to bemuse, confuse and even bore.
And yet it’s utterly entrancing.
It was described by early patrons at Cannes as equal parts vapid and pretentiously self-indulgent on director Nicholas Winding Refn’s part and it has to be said that Only God Forgives – like 2001: A Space Odyssey and many others before it – is one of those films where complete despondency from an audience is understandable. Whereas Drive was a vehicle for Ryan Gosling’s silent charms, here he is a simple brooding accessory to Winding Refn’s unyieldingly exclusionary and yet visually and symbolically engorged filmmaking sensibility. It’s a style that will understandably exhaust and tire many – as indeed happened with Drive – but for those who swallow it whole with eyes and mind left unguarded it’ll leave you delirious in its wake.
Winding Refn’s style can be painstakingly slow and Only God Forgives marks the evolution of that. Characters frequently stare into very little or nothing at all and this coupled with the equal parts vibrant and unsettling cinematographic stylings of Larry Smith – here drowning the film in contrasting primary colour washes and neon evanescence – makes for an experience as narratively ambiguous as it is visually overwhelming.
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| Red like violence or red like the passion of dance? |
Dealing unflinchingly with the issues of masculinity, guilt and consciousness, Only God Forgives holds no punches in its exploration of one man’s entirely abstruse and quite possible literal purgatory. Not forgetting sexual suppression and depravity, that old stickler, never before better lighted or more stylishly presented. As odd a notion as that may seem.
Only God Forgives drips in artistic flourish as much as it does the blood and gore of ultra-violence. ‘Stylish’ will doubtlessly becomes synonymous with the film as stylish it undoubtedly is, fusing exotic lighting with stubbornly unconventional use of the camera to present the film like some foreign fruit, as indeed the sultry backdrop of Bangkok will be to many. And therein lies it’s potential downfall; if for even a second you slip out of Winding Refn’s trippy spell or lose track of the escalating intertwined symbolism, it’ll all seem utterly pointless. And indeed superficial and thematically pretentious.
Only God Forgives experiments with its audience as much as it does the technical tenets of filmmaking.
In much the same way that the film’s technical and narrative merits depend entirely on the individual’s willingness to accept them, so does Ryan Gosling’s performance. He’s done the silent, hard-man shtick before (he effectively wrote the book on it in Drive) but here he’s so silent and so sculpted as to seem positively wooden. Is he even acting? It’s a question that’s – rightfully – already been asked. He spends so much of the runtime staring mostly blank-eyed and stone-faced that to the passer-by or equally ostricised viewer, he may very well be doing nothing at all.
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| Red like...like...like sex or something. Symbolism, guys. |
He also isn’t even the go-to silent warrior this time around. That honour belongs to the exhilarating Vithaya Pansringarm as Chang: a potentially supernatural force of brutal justice – an angel of death – seemingly able to conjure a katana out of nowhere, whose every look, glance and action oozes a sense of unrepentant malevolence and undeniable power.
If Only God Forgives appeals exclusively on the allure of Gosling alone then it may not be the film for you, both if you find his performance entirely lacking and if you believe it belies a more complicated brooding intensity, drowning in the neon symbolism that so characterises the entire production. The real acting heavy-duty is dealt by the captivating Kristen Scott-Thomas who, as Julian’s mother Crystal, provides arguably the sternest psychological test for both her son and the audience, challenging him physically, mentally, emotionally and sexually in an escalating, yet ever muted and symbolically subdued, conflict that invariably ends in violence. Depending on where you fall in regards to accepting Only God Forgives’ languorous ways, the mid-way dinner sequence involving mother & son will either be yet another under-acted, poorly paced and pointless scene or a master class in the subtleties of psychological conflict and tension.
Theirs is a battle of minds, whereas the rest is a storm of fists, blades and blood.
Only God Forgives couldn’t be less a ‘film for everyone.’ The violence is extreme (including a torture scene that puts Saw to shame), absolutely nothing is explicit, characters are ceaselessly ambiguous, narrative beats are indolently slow and the entire production drowns in both heavy-handed and ethereally vague symbolism. And yet it’s also stylistically extraordinary, with a pitch-perfect synthed soundtrack and, for those in the appropriate state of mind, filled with intensely fascinating characters that clash and bleed together in a plot as infinitely interpretable as the concept that drives it.
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| BLUE! Oh yeah there's blue too. Red versus blue. Symbolism is so...symbolic. |
Verdict
Stylish, violent, perplexing, exciting, disgusting and thought provoking in equal measure. Depending on your appetite for the vague and understated, it’ll feel like either cinematic heaven or hell.
5/5
The trailer moves quickly, the film doesn't. Be warned:
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