Only God Forgives, the latest film from Danish director Nicholas Wending Refn, takes Bangkok as its setting, but dresses the city in so much lighting, makeup and gore that it winds up looking like the inside of someone’s fever. The “someone” in this case is most likely Ryan Gosling, who headlines the film in the role of Julian – a drug dealer cum Muay Thai coach with a pensive stare and matriarchal issues both material and symbolic.
The film’s action proceeds from the murder of an underage prostitute, accomplished by Gosling’s sociopathic brother (Tom Burke) who meets his own deserving end shortly thereafter. This in turn sets off a cycle of police-sanctioned revenge killings, in which Julian winds up participating thanks to the timely arrival of his mother – a fire-breathing Kristin Scott Thomas out to protect the family’s honor along with its lucrative narcotics trade.
During its shoot and marketing push, Only God Forgives commanded more attention than the typical Bangkok-based production. Unlike many of the films set in the Big Mango, this one had the potential for cinematic as well as geographic distinction.
Fresh off the high-trash success of Drive, Refn and Gosling seemed primed for great things. In Drive, Refn slathered a revenge flick with rococo visuals, resulting in a film that elevated grindhouse tropes to art house profundities. Yet, even that film seemed at points unbalanced, as if threatened by a crack running the length of its foundation.
As it turns out, such a subterranean flaw did exist, and, in the interval between Refn’s ninth and tenth films, it grew. Only God Forgives bears the full brunt of this damage, eventually toppling into an elegantly framed, red-lit shambles.
The film makes so much of its set dressing and so little of its characters as to skirt surrealism. When characters on occasion interrupt their stretches of portentous silence, they do so in order to deliver terse one-liners. Gosling plays Julian as stone-faced and inscrutable, a justifiable decision, given the scant material he has to work with. With the exception of one fight scene (in which he comes out much the worse for wear), inactivity defines Julian’s character. He sits tied to a chair while he watches his prosti-girlfriend (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam) masturbate; he leans on a doorjamb while contemplating how to dispose of his brother’s killer; he listens in silence to his mother’s tirade about the unimpressive size of his cock.
Other characters fare scarcely better. Vithaya Pansringarm, as a vengeful, sword-wielding police inspector, attempts to capture the inscrutable menace of No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, but neither the script nor the direction can turn this ambition into reality. To Yayaying fall the unenviable tasks of looking pensive and suffering abuse.
It must be said that the character of Crystal, Julian’s mother, is horrible – not a character that possesses the trait of horribleness, but a character written and conceived in so poor a manner as to elicit horror. She showers abuse on all who enter her line of sight; within 30 seconds of meeting Yayaying, she refers to the younger woman as a “cum dumpster.”
There’s no subtext here, no variation or complexity. Kristin Scott Thomas is called on to repeatedly sound a single, dissonant tone.
While Refn displays a deadly lack of interest in his characters, the settings in which he places them betray signs of obsessive attention, even love. The wallpaper in Gosling’s Muay Thai gym provides more nuance and variation than any of the actors who insist on standing in front of it.
Whether framing a gym overseen by nightmarish masks, a nightclub staffed by elegant debutants or a Thai home painted in soft, washed-out greens, Refn never fails to capture a scene-stealing visual. His lighting, composition and set dressing reach stifling levels of grandeur.
Without characters or plot on which to hang his overwhelming visuals, Refn turns to ham-fisted helpings of theme. Have you ever heard of the Oedipus complex? – because Nicholas Wending Refn definitely has. It comes to light that Julian murdered his father, and has an oddly sexual relationship with his mother. Refn’s cameras returns time and again (and again and again and again) to shots of Gosling’s hands, which go on to play a crucial role in the film’s climax.
The most blatant example of this thematic drubbing, and one that neatly encapsulates the project’s overwrought approach, involves Gosling slitting open his mother’s stomach and reaching into the viscera to touch her womb.
In this scene, as in those that surround it, Only God Forgives tries to take itself SUPER SERIOUSLY, but ends up hijacked by Refn’s fetishes for ultra-violence and lush wallpaper.
Drive succeeded by hanging these predilections on a solid plot, engaging characters and a dynamic lead actor. Only God Forgives possesses but one-third of that triptych, which proves inadequate to carry the film.
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