Review of Only God Forgives (2013) by Jono H — 11 Sep 2013

You know when a film is going to be special when it's booed at the Cannes festival. But it isn't all due to Refn's work; he just forgets to offer a decoder along with it. The self-claimed pornographer has created a film that indulges itself in violence, sexual intensity and ambiguity, catering only to the selected few that are either actually artistically cultured or are pretending to be artistically cultured.

Similar to Drive, it stars Ryan Gosling as Julian the emotionally scarred older brother of Billy (Tom Burke) who's murdered by the father of the 12 year old girl, who he brutally raped and killed. Julian then sets out to avenge his brother but spares Billy's killer when he discovers what Billy had done and that judgement day's advocate, a policeman named Chang was involved. However, the domineering mother and empress of a drug empire isn't so empathetic and condones the actions of Billy and demands the killers head "on a fucking platter". Although soon to come, her actions will be judged and Chang and his merciless blade will be at the ready.

The story has a mellow-dramatic style in a sense that the tempo is slow at first and then there's action...then it's slow... then the action etc and to be fair for some reason it worked well in Drive, but it didn't have the same stimulating effect in this film but was actually draining. Refn has created more of "art noir" film and to some extent this has made it difficult to follow; along with the sensitive topics he's chosen to explore, to no surprise has alienated the mass consumer and forced them, no "us" to experience an awkward encounter of strange, domineering sexual fetishes and inevitable violence.

The only aspects of the film that were appreciated and convinced me that it had potential were the contrasted colouring of the tinted of red and black (representing blood, darkness or something else only Refn knows) and the daring one- liners like "do you wanna fight?" Perhaps I'm one of the few that aren't artistically cultured enough to appreciate this particular film, which is probably the basis of my response at the end of the film being equivalent to at the beginning...bemused.