Only God Forgives (2013)

What a waste. What a colossal, self-satisfied, neon-soaked waste of a follow-up. I genuinely cannot think of a more dispiriting case of a filmmaker disappearing up his own backside so completely and so quickly after a genuine triumph. Nicolas Winding Refn made Drive (2011), one of the coolest, most controlled thrillers in recent memory, and then turned around and gave us this: a glacial, pretentious trudge through Bangkok's red-lit corridors that mistakes silence for profundity and provocations for ideas. One star, and I'm being generous.

Ryan Gosling is back, doing the quiet, brooding thing that served him so brilliantly in Drive. But here's the difference: in Drive, the silence meant something. There was a character underneath it, tension coiled beneath the surface, emotion doing quiet work. Here, Gosling just stares. He walks slowly. He occasionally throws a punch. He stares some more. It's not enigmatic, it's not mysterious, it's just vacant. There's nothing behind the eyes because the film hasn't given him anything to be behind the eyes about. A character this blank needs a story or a world doing the heavy lifting. Only God Forgives provides neither.

The plot, such as it is, involves a criminal underworld in Bangkok, a vengeful mother, and a cop who metes out justice in ways that are apparently meant to feel mythological and weighty. It doesn't. It just feels weird and airless and unearned. And then there's the scene with Kristin Scott Thomas. She's playing Gosling's mother, and she commits absolutely fully to a performance so cartoonishly, grotesquely vile that it tips straight into parody. I'm not going to spell out what happens, but there's a particular moment between the two of them that is so repulsive, so gratuitous, and so completely untethered from any coherent theme or dramatic purpose, that I genuinely sat back and wondered what on earth I was watching. Shock for shock's sake. A grotesque flourish in a film that's already drowning in empty provocations. It doesn't deepen anything. It doesn't illuminate anything. It's just there, leering at you.

Visually? Fine. Actually, more than fine. The cinematography is slick, the saturated reds and long tracking shots through silent corridors create something that, in isolation, looks gorgeous. If you turned the sound off, paused it on any given frame, and stuck it on your wall, it'd look the part. But a film isn't a gallery installation, and without characters to care about or a plot that holds together for more than ten minutes, all that visual polish is just decoration on an empty room. The violence is stylised and utterly meaningless. The pacing is so glacially slow it becomes, at points, genuinely funny, though I don't think that was the intention.

What makes it worse is knowing what came before it. I've reviewed plenty of films that are bad on their own terms, but there's a particular sting when a filmmaker who clearly has real talent decides that ambiguity and aesthetic are a substitute for story, character, and emotional engagement. Refn seems to have looked at what made Drive work and concluded that the answer was "less of everything." Less plot, less warmth, less reason for the audience to stay invested. He was wrong. Badly wrong.

I've sat through genuinely difficult, morally murky art cinema and found something worth chewing on, even when it's been uncomfortable. Lars von Trier pushed me to my limits across both volumes of Nymphomaniac: Vol. I (2013) and Nymphomaniac: Vol. II (2013), and I still felt like there was a mind at work, a vision being pursued with some internal logic. Only God Forgives has none of that. It's morally murky without insight, indulgent without imagination, and hollow without being interestingly hollow.

Skip it. Seriously. Unless you're conducting research into how not to follow up a hit, or you're compiling a catalogue of films that confuse deliberate pacing with dramatic tension, there is nothing here for you. Go rewatch Drive. Go appreciate what Refn can do when he's actually trying to connect with an audience rather than perform indifference at them.

One star.

Rating: ★  | Year: 2013  | Watched: 2026-04-29

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Nicolas Winding Refn: Drive (2011)
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More from Denmark: Nymphomaniac: Vol. I (2013) · Nymphomaniac: Vol. II (2013) · Monos (2019) · Triangle of Sadness (2022)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
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