Turn back the clock to 2011 and remember those first trailers for Drive: Ryan Gosling as the improbably well-dressed getaway driver, the honeydew colour palette, and Chromatic’s pulsing, synthetic “The Tick of the Clock.” Drive was something of a mini-sensation when it finally hit screens. Danish weirdo Nicolas Winding Refn ensured his film would garner interest from nerds and cineastes alike by blatantly referencing Walter Hill and Jean-Pierre Melville.
Fast forward to 2013, Only God Forgives re-teams Refn with Gosling. Refn also brings back cinematographer Larry Smith and composer Cliff Martinez from the earlier film, making it something of a spiritual sequel. But instead of acting like a victory lap to Refn’s first American success, it was received with a severe booing at its premiere in Cannes and some of the worst reviews of Refn’s career.
My favourite indignant remark comes from Vulture’s David Edelstein, who says “I thought it was just about the worst fucking thing I had ever seen,” but the consensus seems to be that Refn went too far in his depictions of brutality. “Drive was brooding and bloody,” says Toronto Star’s Peter Howell, “but Only God Forgives goes even further, almost to the point of comic absurdity.” I would actually agree with that statement, but unlike Howell, I don’t necessarily consider “comic absurdity” as something antithetical to the success of Refn’s film, which is underlined by a very dark sense of humour.
Like in Drive, Gosling plays a strong, silent man that walks slowly and does an awful lot of fighting. Like Drive, this film’s narrative progresses at a snail’s pace, letting images do the heavy lifting. Like Drive, Only God Forgives is brutal and bloody. Unlike Drive, these impressions of violence are never tempered by a fairy-tale redemption story or cutesy romantic interludes with Carey Mulligan. Instead, Only God Forgives plays like a feature-length version of that moment in Drive when Gosling stomps a man’s head literally into the floor.
Drive is something of a deconstruction, using archetypes (Gosling’s character has no name, another low-level criminal is called “Standard”) to simplify the American Hero into an overgrown child with a matching sense of morality. Only God Forgives acts like a deconstruction of Drive, moving that same American Hero archetype from Los Angeles to Bangkok, giving him some severe mommy issues, and transforming his love interest from a saviour to a victim. But most importantly, the film lets its “Hero” (and box office draw) get his ass kicked and leaves him with an almost unrecognizable face, which, in contrast to the film’s trailers, is pretty funny.
Gosling plays Julian, a drug dealer in Bangkok who is too repressed to have sex, let alone avenge the death of his brother. His brother Billy (Tom Burke) raped and slaughtered a 16-year-old girl, but that doesn’t matter to Julian’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas), who thinks that Billy “must have had his reasons,” and arranges for vengeance herself, against a demonic local cop (Vithaya Pansringarm) with a penchant for amputation-by-samurai-sword.
It’s not pleasant subject matter. Most people will not be interested in watching Only God Forgives and wouldn’t like it if they did, but that’s OK. Not every film is made for every person, and Nicolas Winding Refn certainly did not make this film to be liked. In stark contrast to Drive, almost every shot and every line of dialogue in this film seems to have been designed to be as uncomfortable as possible. From Thomas’ worst-mom-ever calling her son’s prostitute-cum-girlfriend a “cum dumpster” to an American criminal asking to fuck a Thai pimp’s 14-year-old daughter, this is one of the last movies anyone would want to watch with their parents.
Tonally, the film fits in with Refn’s non-Drive ouevre, echoing the nightmarish atmosphere of something like Valhalla Rising, but precedents can also be found in the work of provocateurs like Gaspar Noe, Harmony Korine, or Refn’s countryman Lars von Trier. Only God Forgives is just as repulsive as the most divisive work of these auteurs, and it raises the same question: These filmmakers are indubitably talented and unique, but when their vision is so purely represented in their work, should we value the finished product?
I would argue that we should. Misogyny, violence, Oedipal subtext, and jokes about cum dumpsters are hardly rare in Hollywood. All of these things are quite common in mainstream entertainment, but in Only God Forgives, they actually hurt. Without artists to push at the boundaries of acceptability, we might not know where to find those boundaries. When someone like Refn creates a piece of art so obviously intended to provoke, there’s an impulse amongst critics to claim that the shock tactics are an immature distraction from any point the filmmaker may have been trying to make. In Only God Forgives, the shock-tactics are the point.
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Alan Jones writes about film for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at@alanjonesxxxv.
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