Review of Lost River (2015) by Manish A — 07 Apr 2015

What a captivating disasterpiece is "Lost River". Critically panned yet defended by certain fans for its visual flair and profundity, it's one of the most intriguing and difficult films I've watched all year.

It certainly has its virtues. The cinematography, by Spring Breakers' Benoît Debie, is the most obvious of them, beautifully framing the city of Detroit to create the colorful yet dark, obscene yet beautiful, broken yet pure fictional city of Lost River, Florida. Fire, always beautiful to watch and full of expressiveness, is used throughout the film to bring life to the crumbling city, as houses are burned and lives destroyed in a never-ending thread of passion and pain, pride and suffering.

Let the images wash over you and you'll miss the story, which is hard enough to piece together as it is. Christina Hendricks is Billy, the struggling mother of two boys (Bones, played Iain De Caestecker, and his younger brother Franky, played by Landyn Stewart). She's forced to work in a shady and exploitative club, a place where women perform (fake) self-mutilation for the entertainment of downtrodden townsfolk, to pay for the mortgage on the house her family lives in. She doesn't like her job, especially because of exploitation from the guy, Dave (Ben Mendelsohn), to whom she owes the money, but she does it to keep the home her family has grown up in while the rest of her street has been burned down or demolished.

Billy's plot could've made for a decent enough drama on its own, but it plays second fiddle to the more entertaining subplot of her son Bones, who is a target for the town crime lord Bully (Matt Smith) after stealing car parts from an abandoned building Bully claims to own. In the process of mixing these two subplots and a few others, the film becomes a bit of a jumbled mess, threaded together only through the flair of Debie's images.

Matt Smith steals the show as Bully, making the absolute most of little back story or direction. He's completely unrecognizable from his "Doctor Who" days with an excellent American accent, unsettling creepiness, and macabre taste for torture (an unintentionally funny scene has Bully snip off a guy's lips with a pair of scissors - it's unintentionally funny because they use the sound of a pair of scissors snipping while the event is happening).

Saoirse Ronan is also great as Rat, Bones' girlfriend (well, that's only really implied) who believes the city of Lost River is cursed because of another town that was drowned by a reservoir decades back. Apparently - and I wish this underdeveloped subplot had more screen time because it's awesome - the curse can only be removed by going under the water and bringing back an item from the city.

The main problem with "Lost River", which is a commendable production in pretty much every aspect, is that its story isn't near as well-developed as the way it's presented. Many scenes go on for unnecessary amounts of time, filling in minutes that could've been spent developing characters instead of showing side characters singing or, in the most cliche way possible, showing them watching old films on projectors in their attics. Overlong montages accompanied by incongruous music show characters doing next to nothing, which is fine when done correctly but generally feels off here. The editing, which is excellent in the opening credits sequence (the best part of the film), sometimes feel off as well, and Gosling sometimes focuses more on the spectacle of scene, his actors delivering lines in strange ways as if they're superfluous to the intent of the film. Sometimes that's true - this is a wholly visual experiment meant to show a crumbling city in a colorful light - but it doesn't help in connecting us to the story, especially when the characters are legitimately interesting.

I do recommend "Lost River" to those who can handle spectacle-over-substance films, but I imagine many will walk out pretty quickly, or fall asleep. It's the kind of film that can at once be seen as pretentious nonsense and a genuine attempt to tell a passionate story in a way that's faithful to the director's inspirations, but you'll have to decide for yourself which of those sides you're more likely to fall into. Me? I'm an apologist for style-based films, even when they're pretty narratively messy like this one, so I quite enjoyed it (except in the aforementioned over-indulgent musical montages). But I can imagine a lot of people really, really hating it.