Only God Forgives Review

Gosling speaks roughly seventeen lines of dialogue, and the scarcity is meant to be the point, though the point wears thin well before the fifty minute mark. Nicolas Winding Refn films Bangkok as a circuit of red corridors and gold interiors lit like an aquarium, and Larry Smith's photography is extraordinary, arguably the finest work anyone has done for this director.

Every frame is composed to be held. Cliff Martinez and his synthesizers carry a great deal of the emotional labour the script declines to do. What actually happens is very thin. A brother is murdered, a mother arrives, a retired policeman named Chang settles accounts with a sword and then sings karaoke to his colleagues. Kristin Scott Thomas is the one live wire, playing Crystal as a bleached, foul mouthed monster who humiliates her surviving son at dinner with a remark about his brother's anatomy, and the film wakes up whenever she speaks.

Vithaya Pansringarm is a fascinating blank. Gosling, though, has been asked to be an absence rather than a character, and he stares through the picture while Refn arranges violence around him. The symbolism of severed hands and long corridors is stated so flatly that it stops signifying anything.