Only God Forgives (2013)

Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives arrived in 2013 carrying the weight of considerable expectation. His previous feature, Drive (2011), had been a critical and commercial hit, turning Ryan Gosling into something close to an icon of cool and cementing Refn's reputation as one of European cinema's more distinctive voices. The follow-up, then, was always going to be watched carefully. Shot almost entirely in Bangkok and co-produced across Denmark, France, Sweden, the United States and Thailand through Wild Bunch, Gaumont and Space Rocket Nation, the film clocks in at a spare 89 minutes. Its tagline, "Time to meet the Devil," gives you a reasonable sense of the register it is aiming for. The premise is, on paper, a fairly recognisable crime-thriller setup: Julian (Gosling) runs a Thai boxing club as the front for a family drug-smuggling operation, and when his brother is killed, his mother Crystal demands that he hunt down and punish those responsible. What Refn does with that material is, depending on your patience and your tolerance for a certain kind of art-house severity, either visionary or maddening.

Refn had been building toward this sort of film for some time, pushing further and further into slow-burn, image-driven territory with each successive project. His work has always sat at the more stylised end of crime cinema, and Only God Forgives represents perhaps his most uncompromising, or at least most confrontational, expression of that tendency. The Bangkok setting is used less as a real place and more as a fever-dream architecture of neon corridors and red-soaked rooms, a choice that drew comparisons to the work of directors like Michael Mann or even David Lynch. Vithaya Pansringarm plays the film's antagonist, a police lieutenant with an almost mythological quality to his violence, and his presence gives the film much of what menace it has. Rhatha Phongam and Gordon Brown round out the principal cast in supporting roles. The most talked-about performance, however, belongs to Kristin Scott Thomas, cast radically against type as Crystal, Julian's deeply unpleasant mother. It is the kind of role that a certain sort of actor clearly relishes, all venom and brittle glamour, and it generated a fair amount of discussion on its release, not all of it positive. Gosling himself, reuniting with Refn after their polished but unremarkable collaboration on The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) aside, leans hard into the minimalist performance style he had used to such effect in Drive, saying very little and letting his face do the work. Whether that approach lands here is exactly the sort of question this film divides audiences over.

The film screened in competition at Cannes in 2013, where it received a notably split reaction, a mixture of boos and applause that rather neatly summarised the wider critical response. Some found it a serious, formally rigorous piece of work. Others thought it was a hollow exercise in atmosphere. It is worth noting, for context, that 2013 was also a year in which Danish co-production circles were producing some genuinely adventurous work (the Nymphomaniac: Vol. I (2013) project from Lars von Trier was arriving around the same time), and the appetite for challenging, difficult European cinema was certainly present. Whether Only God Forgives met that appetite or simply tested it is the central question.

Only God Forgives (2013) is a baffling, self-serious misfire that mistakes mood for meaning and style for substance. Reuniting Ryan Gosling with Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn, it promised brooding tension and atmospheric thriller fare, but instead delivers a glacial, pretentious slog through neon-lit Bangkok brothels, empty corridors, and inexplicable symbolism. Gosling barely speaks (a trait that worked in Drive), but here it just makes his character feel vacant, not enigmatic. He stares, he walks slowly, he occasionally punches someone, but there’s no emotional core, no narrative drive, and certainly no payoff. The film’s most notorious scene (without spoiling specifics) involves Gosling’s character and his mother (played by Kristin Scott Thomas in a performance so cartoonishly vile it veers into parody). It’s not just disturbing; it’s actively repulsive, gratuitous, and utterly disconnected from any coherent theme or story purpose. Rather than deepen the psychological stakes, it feels like shock for shock’s sake, a grotesque flourish in a film already drowning in empty provocations. Visually, Only God Forgives is slick: moody lighting, saturated reds, and long, silent tracking shots create a dreamlike (or nightmarish) tone. But without characters to care about or a plot that makes sense, it’s all surface. The violence is stylised but meaningless, the dialogue sparse to the point of absurdity, and the pacing so slow it becomes comical. After the cool precision of Drive, this feels like a parody of Refn’s worst instincts. Indulgent, emotionally hollow, and morally murky without insight. It’s not just bad; it’s aggressively unengaging. Skip it unless you’re researching how not to follow up a hit.

I keep coming back to that Cannes screening and thinking the booing crowd had the right instinct, even if it felt a little theatrical at the time. There is something almost admirable about a filmmaker willing to alienate his audience so completely, but admirable is not the same as worth your time. Refn clearly has a genuine eye, and on a purely frame-by-frame level there are images here that linger, but a film is not a photo gallery, and mood without momentum is a long evening. If you want to see Gosling in genuinely good form in this kind of register, go back to Drive, or try something like The Nice Guys (2016), where he actually seems to be having a conversation with the film he is in rather than staring blankly through it. Sometimes the most interesting thing a film can teach you is exactly where a director's strengths end.

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

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