This lurid, violent revenge thriller has divided critics – when shown at Cannes it received a mixture of great reviews and loud boos – and is likely to do the same with audiences. Ryan Gosling is back playing another taciturn lead in a film from ‘Drive’ director Nicolas Winding Refn. in ‘Only God Forgives’, Gosling is a gym owner in Bangkok who’s brother is (not undeservedly) brutally murdered. Initially apparently indifferent to the crime, largely at the encouragement of his mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) he ends up embroiled in an increasingly bloody conclusion to the film.
Hyper stylised cinematography, set design and performances, and a setting unfamiliar to Western audiences, provide this film with a dreamlike, other worldly quality to the extent that you start questioning whether what you are seeing is actually happening or imagined by one of the characters. The strange, almost oedipal relationship between Scott Thomas and her sons and the slow moving nature of both the plot and the characters in the film adds to the queasy air.
This sort of stuff is effortless for Gosling and Scott Thomas is memorably grotesque, but the film is stolen by Vithaya Pansringarm as the cop who turns a blind eye to the brother’s murder. Within the weird confines of the film, he pulls off a believable performance of a calm doting father who is also capable of moments of extreme sudden violence.
Not for the faint hearted, and not a film I could imagine watching again, but one I would recommend seeing, as long as you have the stomach for it!