Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest was reportedly met with jeers and walkouts at the Cannes Film Festival, and the critical enmity largely followed it to general release, a sad fate for a film that was widely anticipated after Refn’s Drive (2011) put his name on cineastes’ lips worldwide. Whatever it is, it’s more than a commonplace misfire, however. Only God Forgives clearly sustains and amplifies the director’s personality and themes, and takes major aesthetic risks. Unlike Quentin Tarantino, who’s managed to cleverly play his dual instincts towards referential buoyancy and transgressive provocation to make films successful at both riling and pleasing his audience, Refn here retreats from any expectations a (comparatively) mainstream success delivered. Only God Forgives exacerbates the taciturnity and fascination for violent but deeply conflicted characters that flows through Refn’s oeuvre, and heightens it in adopting a tone of abyssal, nocturnal dread. Setting his film in Bangkok, Refn tries once more to strip dramatic complications down to a minimum, all the better for articulating his stark, skeletal passion play and oneiric symbolism. Ryan Gosling and Tom Burke are American brothers Julian and Billy, expatriates who run a boxing club as cover for a drug dealing operation. One night after a well-attended bout, Billy announces he wants to find a 14-year-old girl to have sex with, and goes out on the town to satiate his need. He finds a hooker who fits the bill, but finishes up mutilating and murdering her.
Enter Police Lieutenant Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), whose stone face and measured walk, not to mention his monochromatic code of ethics, seems like the most elemental edition possible of a certain kind of fetishised cinematic protagonist, from John Wayne to Lee Marvin to Clint Eastwood. Except that Chang is presented as an antagonist for the nominal audience viewpoint, Julian, who eventually proves to have few features recommending him for any kind of identification. Chang seems to believe thoroughly in exactingly totemic justice; with Billy detained at the scene of the crime, Chang has the murdered girl’s father, Choi Yan Lee (Kovit Wattanakul) brought in and gives him the opportunity to take out his rage and grief on his daughter’s murderer. Choi Yan Lee reduces Billy to a bloodied pulp on the floor, but Chang then exacts the price for this privilege, hacking off one of Choi’s arms, as punishment for his own laxity in neglecting his daughter’s safety and putting her at the mercy of the world’s monsters. Julian quickly tracks down the curtailed father, but, after hearing his story, releases him. Julian is haunted by an ethereal angst that’s finally actualised in the person of Chang, whilst he maintains a pseudo-relationship with Mai (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam), a stripper and prostitute working in a high-class brothel Julian frequents. Julian and Billy’s mother Crystal (Kristin Scott Thomas) arrives and demands savage and immediate revenge for her boy’s death, dismissing Julian’s explanation that the situation is “more complicated.” She readily talks Julian and Billy’s confederates Gordon (Gordon Brown) and Byron (Byron Gibson) into hiring assassins first to cut Choi’s throat, and then to gun down Chang. This goes badly wrong, however, with mean results for the would-be killers.
On one level, Only God Forgives, with its deliberately reductive, placard-like dialogue and obvious stock of psychologised images and metaphors, is hackneyed and shallow. But Refn’s narrative, whilst mostly coherent, is pitched on an ambiguous level of reality, and stylised in a fashion both quietly mesmeric and bleakly compelling, imbuing the tale with a sense of otherworldly alienation and anxiety that ironically only disappears when acts of extreme corporeal brutality are nigh. The whole thing could be a dream. Some sequences in it are certainly fantasy, but even dreams here seem to contain fragments of seer-like insight, as when Julian goes through his apparently ritualised act with Mai in the brothel, where she ties him to a chair and masturbates in front of him, he has visions of walking down corridors, approaching a doorway with only blackness beyond that could contain hell, or Oedipal nothingness, and he seems to anticipate Chang’s sword hacking off one of his own arms as a fitting consummation for his own fetishistic anxiety over his hands and fear of being castrated by losing them. These sequences suggest the ever-lengthening shadow of David Lynch, whilst elsewhere Refn’s peculiar feel for the modern genre canon is in evidence. Whereas Drive referenced the sunnier side of ‘80s genre cinema with its day-glo pink titles and pop music to anchor its brutal but essentialist take on a familiar white knight tale, Only God Forgives takes a plunge into a more stygian world with a different set of references: the grotty midnight perversity of Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) is evoked, as is the rain-and-neon aesthetic Ridley Scott’s urban noirs Blade Runner (1981) and Black Rain (1989), stripped of box office pretension.
Shakespearean themes bob up throughout. Crystal is a salon-tanned, gloss-lipped Lady Macbeth, egging on weak-willed men to ruthless action, whilst Julian’s declination to action evokes Hamlet’s, as he wordlessly contemplates proper action in his sphere of existence, where the threat and implementation of horrible violence is a daily reality but still not one he’s comfortable with. A sequence in which he randomly assaults two men in the brothel bar evokes Hamlet’s skewering of Polonius, an act of oblique, sublimating destruction that both relieves and frustrates his will for more pressing duties, whilst his conscience and his blood argue themselves to a standstill. Chang’s assault on Byron’s eyes strongly evokes the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear, and is likewise incurred as punishment for his loyalty and honour, albeit a very different manifestation of both. But whereas Shakespearean drama is always volubly immediate, Refn never tries to build traditional excitement or anticipation, only a kind of percolating unease waiting for pay-offs in moments of extraordinary brutality, in a world that is otherwise sparse and depopulated. Many scenes set in the small hours when the city lanes are deserted and frigidly lonely, and even the few daylight sequences seem detached from commonplace reality.
As with Valhalla Rising (2010), Refn privileges his main characters with the quality of foresight as they drive toward a predestined end, and this quality conspires to sabotage the film’s nominal storytelling aims. One peculiarly oblique moment depicts Chang interrogating two of his would-be assassins, in front of one man’s crippled, developmentally-delayed son. The boy seems to anticipate Chang drawing his sword by gesturing to his own back, perhaps a reference to the arcane belief that people with such afflictions were children of God, in touch with the spiritual in their innocence, and thus anticipates what the self-appointed God Chang is about to do. Refn exacerbates his tendency towards undercutting genre cliché more obviously in a sequence in which Julian challenges Chang to a fight, only to have the policeman kick his ass with ridiculous ease. The few bystanders in the drama are locked into friezes, like the hookers in a brothel where Chang confronts Byron, to Chang’s police entourage watching in silent, statuesque admiration whilst he sings karaoke. “Remember, girls, no matter what happens, keep your eyes closed,” Chang tells those hookers, “And you men — take a good look.” A memorable piece of cinematic auto-suggestion.
The accumulating result of Refn’s alienation effects then is to make his film feel like something that’s already happened, a fait accompli, a date with fate Julian cannot escape, nor, eventually, does he want to. Chang’s habit of singing karaoke after nights of gruesome justice has been characterised by some commentators as glib incongruity, but in the context of the film’s texture, feel rather like evocations of sad beauty, invocatory songs for the dead and the wronged, essayed through the most banal of modern methods. Eventually it emerges that Julian killed his abusive father at Crystal’s behest, and she’s able to rely on his continuing loyalty to her to finally manipulate him, after her killers have been hacked to bloody pieces by Chang, into taking on the job himself. But Julian himself seems to devoutly wish punishment for his own sins and to be delivered from his heritage. The film’s only striking dialogue scene is a study in Crystal’s pathology, when she has dinner with Julian and Mai, whom she clocks immediately as a hooker, and proceeds to roast both slowly with insults and discomforting theories about Julian’s jealousy of his brother’s enormous penis. Whilst the flat psychology and ostentatious daring and irony are here, as elsewhere in the film, thin, even clichéd in concept, in practice they prove mordantly funny and transfixing, because it’s so baldly brutal and poised. Thomas is fun in playing a character so far out of her former persona, daring to play Crystal is a creature without a single redeeming feature but allowing hints of actual sorrow and fear to show around the edges of her mask-like manipulations.
Refn’s scenes of violence, which he himself gleefully likened to acts of pornographic display, are indeed nasty, but for the most part he actually adopts a discreet distance, preferring instead to survey the results of bestial violence. The central set-piece of cruelty is Chang’s torture of Byron in the course of following the conspiracy to assassinate him through levels of petty thug to kingpin: Chang stabs the defiant Byron with hairpins before skewering his eyes and ears. It’s a rugged scene, but anyone who’s sat through a Hostel film will find it rather passé. Refn’s fascination with damage inflicted in human bodies, particularly hands and eyes, undoubtedly invokes intensely phobic associations that shock the film’s otherwise narcotised mood into sharp relief. But it does serve a thematic purpose, in questioning just how advanced our ideas of justice are: rather than the clinically detached affectations of modern capital punishment in America or China (already memorably, stingingly countenanced by Johnnie To this year with Drug War) where there is still a detectable variety of ancient, ritualised punitive brutality underlying the modern nation-state’s pretence to disinterested punishment, Refn offers a throwback to a pre-Renaissance sense of moral order. Chang, dubbed the “Angel of Vengeance” in urban folklore, is possessed of seemingly deistic capacities, able to look into the eyes of people and deduce their guilt or innocence, and asking the guilty with stony world-weariness, “What’s your excuse?”, as if to indicate that his world-view is not leavened by the vicissitudes of the moment but by precepts carved in stone. This also intriguingly connects Chang’s code to a concept of justice tethered to an inflexibly ordered system of corporeal disfigurement, a system shared by many cultures, including the Anglo-Saxon as well as the inevitable Mosaic, eye-for-an-eye reference.
Only God Forgives contends with a similar central conceit of the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007), substituting a small but lethally poised lawman for a hulking psycho as its engine of merciless wrath, whose violence he believes gives the world composure and order. Certainly at least the films share this basic motif. But where the Coens were out to flamboyantly shock the morality-play underpinnings of genre expectations in a facetious way, Refn avoids stunts, taking the opposite approach of inexorable predestination, nervelessly offering what would be in more prosaic hands a familiar drama: a raffishly redeemable criminal goes up against a chillingly terrible representative of law and order. The surprising quality of Refn’s take is not that he presents moral ambivalence but rather that he presents it in such mediaeval, unreconstructed ways, and pointing unabashedly toward a theme of actual humanity, as a conscious and cognitive being, requiring the capacity to accept punishment and make sacrifice as the only ennobling qualities of existence.
Not surprisingly for a film as caught up in macho hysterics as this one – albeit hysterics articulated through a stylistically opposite tenor – the female characters are presented as islets of sanity and normality, albeit always endangered, except for the masculinised Crystal. She plays on her supposed gender delicacy (she’s seen at one point ogling musclemen in a manner normally privileged for men watching women) to manipulate Julian into finally taking on Chang. Mai is, in spite of her mercenary, carnal profession, genuine in her liking for the tortured Julian, and is pleased when he asks her to meet his mother: Phongam pulls off the film’s most delicate piece of acting as Mai’s pleasure sours with Julian’s addendum that he wants them to seem like a “real couple.” Julian pushes Mai out of his life subsequently when she questions the perverse family dynamics she’s just witnessed, but refuses to be cowered by his anger, instead stripping off the expensive dress he bought her and handing it back to him, finding a peculiar nobility in standing half-naked in a city street. Similarly, Chang’s one weak-point is his wife and small daughter, and the film’s last scenes depict Julian saving an innocent, a choice that redeems him partly, even if he still must pay the ferryman, or Chang, with blood and bone. He is implicitly freed from his diseased lineage in an act of literal Oedipal communion with his mother’s body after Chang’s visited her hotel room.
The problem with Only God Forgives is less one of execution than of concept. The story is finally not quite abstract enough to turn into a properly Freudian death-dream, but also frustrates hopes for more modest pleasures even as it ticks through story-points as cool and seemingly detached as Chang himself, so that as a thriller, tension is only sustained by the question of when the next act of horror will occur, rather than by emotional engagement with the plights of the characters. Perhaps the fault lies in Refn trying to transfer his reductive fascination for dead-eyed avatars of the primal human condition and dreamlike stylisation onto a film that tries to wrestle with frightening moral questions. The finale would have far more impact if Julian was rendered more desperate, volatile, and altogether vivid as a person, a pool of instincts, impulses, and reactions, rather than a distant quandary. Some ideas that might have been worked for more memorable or unpredictable results, like the joke of the main character, played by a handsome movie star, proving to be an easily clobbered puss, or Crystal trying to turn her manipulative wiles on Chang to set him after her intransigent son rather than herself, only to find he sees through her, are instead slapped down like cold fish shovelled out of the freezer and left to thaw on a bench-top. Refn never quite hurls himself into the zone of chaos that might have made this a magnificently mad artwork; instead it finishes up feeling like a sketch for something richer and stranger. Only God Forgives then is an interesting and compelling case of a filmmaker pushing himself beyond the limit of what his hitherto successful lexicon could prepare him for. But Refn is at least trying to make his audience feel something, on the level of visceral reaction certainly, and also on the level of contemplating the building blocks of violent entertainment and ethical exegesis. It is a strange, discomforting, alternatively hallucinogenically beautiful and deeply ugly work, and however else the film strikes you, the cold splendour of Larry Smith’s photography and the throbbing excellence of Cliff Martinez’s score, a work in the key of the best electronic film music of Tangerine Dream or John Carpenter and Alan Howarth, can’t be denied.
