New Release Review: 'Only God Forgives'

Only God Forgives really shouldn't be playing in the big cinema chains. To get the most out of the film, and I'm not sure there's really all that much to be got, it ought to be seen at your local art house cinema; or better yet, it should be set up as an art installation. You could stroll past it, catching a glimpse of its moody, mannered aesthetic and its heavy handed approach to sex and death, oedipal desire, and justice, and then you could move on, having been briefly intrigued, but knowing full well that you really weren't missing much.

The story, in as far as there is one, mostly follows Julian (Ryan Gosling) as he's coaxed into avenging his brother's untimely death, which came about at the behest of Lieutenant Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), a police officer with a seriously Old Testament approach to punishment. Those expecting a continuation of the work Gosling and director Nicolas Winding Refn did on Drive should tweak their expectations somewhat. Only God Forgives has much more in common with Refn's earlier effort Valhalla Rising. Both films exist in a netherworld between our own and something like purgatory, or hell. In the heavily atmospheric Valhalla Rising that was a good fit: it being set a thousand years ago in a brutal wasteland where death is ever present. In Only God Forgives that same portentous tone becomes much more trying, even laughable; and coupled with a poised and distant aesthetic, and lighting as heavy handed as its themes, the film ends up being wilfully inaccessible.

It reminded me of nothing so much as the early student films I saw at film school. The script is a wisp of a thing; the cinematography is only notable because of lighting so stark that the colours red and blue have a greater screen presence than most of the cast; and as for the cast:

• Gosling isn't an actor that's been capable of suggesting his characters have a rich inner life, so when he's given barely a dozen lines and has to spend most of the film conveying his feelings through glances, it works... Not terribly well. 
• Kristin Scott Thomas, as Julian's foulmouthed mother, seems to be having fun, cast against type, but she's just one amongst a slew of people to not care about. 
• Pansringarm is at least captivating to watch, yet Refn seems to be going out of his way to undercut the man's natural charisma by having him sing karaoke. Twice. In full.

If Refn scrapped all the pseudo dream sequences and hallucinations the film would probably have come to less than 50 minutes. He should probably make a cut of just those segments and put it in an art gallery and see how it fares. It'd be a good fit. Or at least a better one; because as a piece of cinema it's seriously lacking.

Overall: 1.5/10