3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Only God Forgives

2013,  Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive) - Netflix

The new fangled word all the movie kids are using these days is vibe. As Patrick Willems says, quoting Tenet, "Don't try to understand it... feel it." We will ignore the fact that he uses the word vibe as an acronym for guys-in-suits movies, he still hangs it on the idea there are movies where plot & story are a step behind the feel of the movie.

Only God Forgives is a movie where the visuals, and the mood, and the pink/red colour spectrum are far more important than the violent, seedy revenge flick being played out on the screen. Scenes are constantly presented, frozen in motion, more photographs than moving pictures. We are gazing at art, striving to understand what the artist meant by it all.

The movie is set in Thailand. Julian (Ryan Gosling, Barbie) and Billy (Tom Burke, The Lazarus Project) run a Thai Boxing club, but we know its a front for something. Billy goes looking for underage sex, and ends up killing the girl. For whatever reason, he doesn't leave the room when discovered by police. The chief, Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm, Thirteen Lives), allows the girl's father to beat Billy to death in return for having an arm cut off, for making his daughter a prostitute. Julian and his thugs track down the father, but let him live, as he understands why his brother was killed. Then their mother (Kristin Scott Thomas, Mission: Impossible) arrives, enraged at Julian's lack of retribution. She sets in motion a plan to have not only the father killed, but the police chief Chang as well. It doesn't go well.

That's the plot, a rather simplistic revenge thriller, but that doesn't matter. Refn builds visual after visual, still lifes of colour and mood to elicit an emotional response. Pristine beauty is juxtaposed with ultra violence, wealth with poverty. Nobody is a hero here, nobody leaves the movie unscathed. 

In watching Poor Things, I commented on how I appreciated the movie but was not quite sure I enjoyed it. The same hesitance sits here with me. But I can say that I was moved by this movie, the right emotions were drawn from me by the visuals and colours: revulsion, admiration, rage. I know I wanted to see this movie when it first came out, knowing full well how much I loved Drive. But I think, even then at the beginning of the blog, I was moving away from That Guy and I waited, ten years, trying to recapture him.