[7]

Against a backdrop of the Bangkok underground fighting scene, a reticent drug smuggler (Ryan Gosling) is caught in a vicious cycle of brutal revenge after his brother is murdered for committing rape. Only God Forgives plays out like a fever dream, a far more operatic and surreal effort from writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn than his earlier mainstream hit, Drive. There is precious little dialogue, hyper-stylized photography, a brash score by Cliff Martinez, and a willful tendency to blur the line between reality and the characters' imaginations.

Gosling provides the quiet, brooding, emotionally disturbed center of the film. He’s like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name here (and in Drive), where the less he says the more you want to know. The slightest gestures speak volumes. In contrast, we have a fierce, scene-stealing performance from Kristin Scott Thomas as Gosling’s mother, an incendiary beast who does her damnedest to motivate Gosling to exact revenge for his brother. As vile and humiliating as she is to Gosling’s character, there are incestuous undertones that permeate their interactions, making it one of the most unsettling and provocative relationships in my recent movie memory. And then there’s Vithaya Pansringarm as their highly deadly adversary, a man who moves as calmly as Gosling and speaks as little, but with the lightning-quick ability to slit throats and chop people’s forearms clean from their bodies.

Refn is unafraid to play with the film’s tone, swinging from the tragic to the comedic, the violently offensive to the emotionally tender. I think most people will form their opinions of the movie based on the shifting tone. The execution is ultimately a matter of taste, but I think it takes balls to make a film like Only God Forgives. For originality and purity of vision, I admire it.