Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest picture, Only God Forgives, could be referred to as ‘pure style,’ in that it’s obsessed with its own craft. Mannered and deliberate, Only God Forgives finds Refn wholeheartedly rejecting the docu-style of his early work and instead embracing an immensely exaggerated stylisation first hinted at in Bronson. Walls are hot with the gaudy light of primary colors; the mise-en-scene is arranged with utmost precision; camera movement is glacial, almost to the point of being stilted; and statue-like actors are moved like chess pieces, mere props in Refn’s hands.
There has been criticism. And though Refn’s vision for the film really didn’t require an actor of Ryan Gosling’s skill to play the part of Thai boxing promoter Julian, an emotionless avatar and the ostensible lead, Gosling’s blankness actually serves the film greatly. Only God Forgives on the whole, in fact, is intended to be overly-sleek, slow-paced and unsettlingly weird. Backed by a gothic score that’s funereal classical by way of electro-pop, it’s not meant to be viewed literally, but as Nicolas Winding Refn’s 90-minute nightmare.
Only God Forgives is no normal picture. It can’t really be discussed in terms of story (it barely has one) or acting. Refn doesn’t seem interested in making his actors anything other than ghoulish inhabitants of his east-meets-west melange. He takes cold Kubrickian positioning to the extreme, and the editing feels heavily influenced by David Lynch; there are numerous unnerving long takes, and the storytelling can be unapologetically oblique.
The basic premise follows Julian and his mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) as they square off against Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), an ex-cop and angel of death who oversaw the death of Julian’s brother Billy (Tom Burke). But Only God Forgives has little concern for plot. Refn cares more about assembling a convincing dreamscape, one with an atmosphere powerful enough to keep the viewer absorbed. Translating a dream to film is rarely done with this kind of success.
Only God Forgives has a more convincing dream world than Inception, for example, yet the latter was largely embraced by critics and audiences. Perhaps its lengthy exposition and the grounding of its dream world in a recognizable reality made the dream more palatable. But since when did characters in a dream communicate in straightforward, coherent sentences? When in real life are the irregularities of our dream explained to us while we’re dreaming, a benefit Nolan’s characters frequently enjoy?
Refn’s dream does no such pandering. The fact it makes no attempt to ease the viewer into the hellish nightmare is the strongest argument that Only God Forgives is a mischievous effort to make something deliberately difficult to digest. Like dreams in real life, the film never quite confirms if we’re in a dream or not. Unlike the naturalistic behaviour of those in Inception, the characters in Only God Forgives act strangely wooden, making odd and portentous remarks (another Lynchian influence).
Time seems peculiarly slowed and lethargic in Only God Forgives. Character movement is stiff, robotic, and nightmarish. The otherworldliness of Refn’s Bangkok, here presented as a grottier version of Enter the Void’s neon Tokyo, is highlighted by the fact that the film is set almost entirely over a dark, never-ending night. Then there’s the frequent deviation into overt fantasy, intermittent inserting shots of Julian stalking through claustrophobic dark corridors, passageways that give him visions of his eventual fate.
Fantasy bleeds into every point of Only God Forgives, like the way Chang conjures his machete from nothingness, or how he has a predilection for singing karaoke post-murder. The non-linear narrative even culminates in an extended rendition of a dream-pop ballad by Chang – a disturbingly soulful moment considering all that comes before – that has no obvious reason to be the film’s final scene. It’s something that we’d expect from Lynch, but not from Refn. It doesn’t make narrative sense, but that’s dream logic, and on some deeper subconscious level, it feels right.
Aside from the constant, nagging unrealism and stately pace, there’s also the matter of the seemingly gratuitous violence and sexual references. Yes, Refn has dealt with heavy violence before – see Valhalla Rising’s disembowelment scene, or Drive’s notorious elevator head-stomp – but Only God Forgives is different in that he’s cited it as a very personal work. Here, the director uses the bones of a genre piece to look inward and self-consciously explore his own obsession with sex and violence.
Only God Forgives’ scenes of dismemberment and torture are so intense, frightening and over-the-top that they can only be part of a nightmare, thoughts buried in the deepest recesses of a mind. (The same is true of the incestuous relationship between Julian and his mother, an Oedipal reference that’s so obvious it’s actually one of the film’s few missteps.) The film feels cathartic , as if Refn is purging something from deep inside himself and onto the screen. This is his brutal nightmare, with Julian’s blankness serving as a means for the audience to project themselves onto him so that they can vicariously experience the nightmare too. Taking the film literally is the greatest enemy to the viewer’s enjoyment; seeing Only God Forgives as a trip into one man’s violent dream world is the only way to view it.
