Only God Forgives (2013)

Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives arrives in Bangkok with a modern cowboy, a Muay Thai gym that launders drug money, and a police lieutenant who severs forearms with the calm of a man trimming hedges. Ryan Gosling speaks seventeen lines. Kristin Scott Thomas plays a mafia matriarch assembled from Lady Macbeth and Donatella Versace, and she spends her scenes emasculating her surviving son in a restaurant. The film is a fairy tale, Refn says, though the fairy tale involves a brothel, a murdered child, and a hand inserted into a dead mother's abdomen. Cannes booed and applauded in the same evening. This is the sort of reception that greets a director who has decided that coherence is a bourgeois obligation.

Our ledger of social consciousness runs dry rather quickly. The Bangkok setting supplies a large Thai supporting cast, which reads as verisimilitude instead of any deliberate representational program, so that marker sits low and lonely. A Thai avenger punishes foreign depravity, which gestures faintly at Western exploitation of the region without ever articulating a racial argument. Everything else registers zero. No queer subtext. No feminist reading survives contact with a film that treats women as prostitutes, corpses, or castrating mothers. No climate, no body positivity, no neurodivergence, no indictment of capital. The criminal enterprise is amoral spectacle, not a thesis about wealth.

What keeps the film from the sermon is its near-total silence. Refn builds his nightmare from neon corridors and karaoke interludes, and he never once turns to the camera to explain the moral. There is no lecture here, no preachy coda, no lesson delivered over the closing credits. Just a man offering his hands to be cut off, and a police officer singing afterward. We have classified it. We feel nothing. That is, apparently, the point.