Recencies van critici

Anyone seduced by the flatulent over-direction... can doubtless find something about "hell on earth" or "East-West relations" to ascribe all this punishment to, but there's really no point. Refn isn't lecturing us like Haneke or provoking us like Tarantino—he just really seems to enjoy torture and dismemberment and it pleases him to let us know this.

The inadvertent result of all these moves put together — punctuated with gruesome inserts of bodily decapitations by a Thai master's sword, plus assorted dream/fantasy images — is a strange species of comedy, like a parody of Marguerite Duras' India Song (1975): no matter what spine-tingling, life-threatening menace awaits just off-frame, Winding Refn willalways cut to Ryan Gosling standing stock still like a zombie. That is, a zombie who is also a Country Priest.

It resembles Gaspar Noé's eyeball searing faux-Asiania in Into the Void, which was certainly problematic in itself. But at least Noé understands the value of keeping the camera moving, plunging into impossible visual situations, so as to provide some semblance of psychological frisson... and avant-garde showmanship... But Only God Forgives breaks up the monotony with Kristen Scott Thomas's evil-mommy Cruella deVil, practically leading her son by the balls with a truly revolting Oedipal ooze.

In the film, Refn allows his formal and stylistic flourishes to run wild, pushing them to nearly parodic levels... This emotionally hollow film isn't merely an instance of style over substance, but style as an excuse for an utter lack of substance.

I was utterly engrossed by the cultural dynamics central to the film. Put simply, all of the white characters are consumers, tourists, and their consumption is what causes much of the trouble for Bangkok's luckless citizenry.

Refn keeps things moving languorously as if the film's pace were timed to a metronome, and he shoots his sequences of increasingly graphic violence as pointed, perhaps even ironic indulgences in the stuff of low-brow schlock. The rest remains purposefully shallow: casting aside drama, characterization, and a well-developed plot, "Only God Forgives" coasts instead on the decadence of its surfaces...

Nicolas Winding Refn has stated that he wanted "Only God Forgives" to be a Western set in Bangkok, which is as good a pronouncement as any of the film's precious pomposity. Oedipal motifs are thrown around like confetti: Gasp as Crystal laments Billy's sizable phallus! Shiver as she calls Juian's date a phrase that rhymes with "mum dumpster"! Cringe when a character literalizes the Freudian desire to go back into the womb!

A son slicing open his already bled-out mother and then fisting her entrails is just one of Nicolas Winding Refn's more delicate touches in the Bangkok-set Only God Forgives, a turgid mix of ersatz Greek tragedy, Muay Thai, and shiny, seductive gore.

Directors are always digging around in their psyches for material — David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Lars von Trier, Gaspar Noé. Refn's anxiety seems out to top theirs. But there's no joy or folly or transcendence. It's a one-dimensional video game of death, with Gosling as its star. To love him here — or Refn, for that matter — is to be a necrophiliac.

...These individual shots seem designed as events in themselves, but they don't acquire cumulative rhythm when strung together. A sympathetic viewer might say the movie visualizes the subjective evasions and memory gaps of a psyche fractured by incest and trauma, a plausible defense. But Refn's sudden jumps in location or omissions of random narrative connective tissue are consistent without being intriguing.

DP Larry Smith (who worked with Refn on 2008's Bronson) convincingly makes it seem as if the hallways are saturated with viscous blood, but the perplexing back-and-forth between "dream" and fight sequences, coupled with an intrusive soundtrack heavy on synthetic strings, make the movie difficult to attend to. In a knowing nod to just how little what the characters say actually matters, several pivotal conversations are inaudible: lips move, but the soundtrack drowns out the voices.

...If Only God Forgives has anything going for it, it's that it's clearly the movie that its creator wanted to make. Of course, that's also mostly what's wrong with it: it turns out that Refn's sensibility, when so fully distilled, is purely and potently toxic... It's not that Only God Forgives is nasty—it's that its nastiness doesn't point to anything except the attitude of the man behind the camera.