Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Only God Forgives” is a film about vengeance, cruelty and the limits of forgiveness. It is also a film that treats its audience like a punching bag. The movie wants to be a dark, brooding meditation on violence and family duty. Instead it plays like a mood board for a bad trip, full of atmosphere and almost nothing else.
Ryan Gosling stars as Julian, a man running a Thai boxing club as a front for his family’s drug trade. His brother Billy is dead, killed by a gangster named Chang. Julian’s mother Crystal, played with icy precision by Kristin Scott Thomas, orders him to find the man responsible. He refuses. The film then spends nearly ninety minutes circling around that refusal, with Chang hunting Julian while Crystal schemes to take Chang down herself.
Trailer, via RADiUS.
Crystal and Chang
Crystal is the engine of the picture. Thomas is terrifying, and she is mesmerizing. Every scene she appears in is better than the ones she doesn’t. The film’s problem is that she only shows up in fragments.
Chang, played by Vithaya Pansringarm, is the film’s other axis. He is a policeman who calls himself “The Angel of Vengeance,” a man who believes he is God in the sense that God can be cruel and terrifying. Refn describes the character as a “mythological creature” that has appeared in his films before, played by different actors. That description fits the performance, which is stiff and ritualistic rather than human.
Julian’s Silence
Julian is meant to be a quiet, wounded figure. Gosling speaks only seventeen lines in the entire film. The idea for him to stick his hand into his dead mother’s womb came from Gosling himself. That is a striking image. As a character, Julian barely exists. He reacts to things happening around him rather than driving the plot forward.
The film’s central relationship is between Julian and Crystal, but it is a one-sided affair. Crystal dominates. Julian is a passive observer, a man who watches the world crush him without ever raising a finger to stop it. That passivity is meant to be tragic. In practice it reads as a lack of imagination on the writer’s part.
The Bangkok Setting
The film was shot on location in Bangkok, Thailand. It looks beautiful, all neon and shadow. The production design is excellent. The sound design, with its pounding bass and distant screams, is effective. None of this saves the story underneath.
What Works
- Kristin Scott Thomas’s performance as Crystal.
- The cinematography of Bangkok.
- The film’s willingness to commit fully to its surreal, almost cartoonish vision of violence.
- The music, which is often cited as a highlight.
What doesn’t work:
- The screenplay, which is thin and repetitive.
- The characterization of Julian, who is a blank slate.
- The pacing, which grinds to a halt in the middle stretch.
- The plot, which never coheres into a satisfying shape.
Reception
The film premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Critics were split. Some praised the soundtrack, the action and Refn’s distinctive style. Others criticized the writing and the characterization. The film competed for the Palme d’Or. It left with a mixed record.
That split reaction is telling. “Only God Forgives” is a film that rewards attention to surface but punishes patience. It is a film about violence that never quite commits to what violence means. Chang kills people offscreen, Crystal schemes offscreen, Julian suffers offscreen. The film is full of faces and shadows but empty of substance.
There is a reason Julian never fights back. The film has no interest in giving him the tools to. It is a portrait of a man who has lost everything and found nothing to replace it. That portrait is technically competent but emotionally hollow.
The Verdict
“Only God Forgives” is a failure of ambition. It wants to be a great film about vengeance and comes out as a stylish mess. It is worth seeing once for the performance of Kristin Scott Thomas. It is not worth revisiting.
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