"When I was pregnant with you... it was strange. You were different. They wanted me to terminate... but I wouldn't. And you're right. I don't understand you, and I never will."
In my opinion, Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, the movie for which he won the Best Director's award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, is the best movie to come out of Hollywood in over 40 years. This fact makes trying to explain how much I was looking forward to watching Only God Forgives, Refn's second collaboration with Ryan Gosling, about as difficult as trying to explain to a blind man what colours are. I was surprised to hear that the movie was getting absolutely slammed by critiques all over the world, but now that I've sen it, I'm extremely happy and thankful to be able to kindly ask those critiques to go fuck themselves with a rake. In my opinion, Only God Forgives is the best movie to premiere since Drive, and it's sad to see that it isn't getting the recognition I think it deserves.
A lot of people have been complaining about the plot of Only God Forgives, claiming that it's weak and without purpose, but the way I see it, this element of the movie is actually pretty simple and straight forward in a lot of aspects. Yes, the way it's being told makes it seem more convoluted and weird than it actually is, but I'm 99 % sure that this was a completely intentional move on Refn's part. The main story of this movie is about Julian, a cold hearted and emotionless yet successful Bangkok drug lord, who is coaxed into taking out his brother's killers by his exploitive and power hungry mother. Everyone who's seen the movie will accept this plot synopsis and think of it as being accurate to what they saw, myself included, but what they don't realise is that it deals with a bunch of other themes as well. These themes are dealt with through some surreal and sometimes even unexplainable scenes that are placed regularly throughout the movie, scenes that are easily written off as incomplete or incoherent, and their presence and eventual importance to the main message of the movie is Only God Forgive's main turn off/problem for a lot of people.
Now that I've spend so much time trying to justify the subplots of this movie, you're probably gonna wonder why I'm not gonna go into specific detail about all the ins and outs of every one of those freakish and artsy scenes I was talking about. Sure, I'd really like to, but doing so without ruining some of the best parts of this movie is impossible. One of the things I enjoyed the most about Refn and Gosling's latest collaboration is how it got me thinking and wondering, and I want everyone who enjoys good movie making as much as I do to experience the same thing. I feel safe saying that some of the themes that this movie deals with, apart from the main revenge-based story line, are things like redemption, self forgiveness, spirituality and Oedipus complexes, but how they come into play is something I want you to watch the movie and figure out for yourself. Enough of the plot, let's get to the real meat of this review.
If you're a sensitive person who doesn't like bloody and violent movies, well, Only God Forgives is not for you. Refn's latest movie is his most gory picture to date, and its sheer amount of mangled corpses and separated limbs has proved to be very unsettling for a lot audiences. I can understand how people who just don't like looking at such things will be repulsed by this movie, I get that, but those critiques who have been saying that Only God Forgives is violent just to be violent and that it serves no actual purpose whatsoever, are 100 % completely wrong. I'm a very understanding person who accepts other people's opinions in general, but in this case, I'm gonna go out there and say that those opinions are just wrong. The violent content in this movies is absolutely vital for it to create the right tone and atmosphere, more specifically, the feeling that death is lurking just around every corner, ready to cut your hands off with a freaking samurai sword. The fact that I felt as though the grim reaper himself was present in every single scene, just waiting to claim his next soul, was one of the absolutely most enjoyable yet unsettling parts of this movie, and this element wouldn't have been marginally as effective without the very graphic violence that Refn has created.
As anyone who loves Drive will know, Nicolas Winding Refn is a demi-god behind a camera. Every single movie he's ever made, well or poorly received, has been created with near flawless craftsmanship and care, and Only God Forgives is as well. The camera work in this movie is some of the best I've seen since I started reviewing movies, and to me, its most memorable scenes are the ones that are the most beautiful to look at. The slow-panning hallway steady-cam shots were particularly incredible to me, because of the suspense they added to the scenes in which they were used. Character closeups are another vital element to this movie, because of they way they're used to display what a specific character is feeling at certain moment throughout the movie. A lot of times the director would have his actors express their character's emotions through facial expressions instead of dialogue, and it worked incredibly well for this movie. A picture says more than a thousand words as they say, and Ryan Gosling's, Kristin Scott Thomas' and Vithaya Pansringarm's facial expressions does the same in this movie.
Being as beautiful on the outside as I knew this movie was gonna be, one of the things I was most worried about before watching Only God Forgives, was whether or not it was gonna be able to suck me into its story and have me believe that I was watching real events instead of a movie, in the same way that Drive did. And oh my lord did it ever. About 80 minutes into the movie, 10 minutes before it was gonna end, was when I suddenly remembered that what I was watching actually wasn't real. The last time it took me nearly so long was when I saw Gladiator for the first time, and that movie is one of my top three favourites of all time today. Because this element is the very essence of great storytelling in my opinion, any movie maker that can do this to his audience deserves to be praised tremendously, and Refn is the only director who's managed to make me feel that way in two consecutive movies.
Being as heavily reliant on visuals and atmosphere as it is, you absolutely have to see Only God Forgives in the a theatre, in order to enjoy it to its maximum potential. This sadly is the movies greatest downfall in my opinion, simply because a lot of people aren't going to do that, based on its very bad early reviews. Waiting for Only God Forgives to come out on BluRay and DVD so you can download a low quality version of it and watch it on your 14" laptop with a pair of cheap earplugs is a horrible idea, and it'll diminish everything fantastic about the movie completely. Appealing to large audiences isn't important to me when deciding how good a movie is, but it's still a shame that this one will get a reputation of being a "bad movie", because of the low amount of people who are gonna watch it the way it was meant to be seen.
To sum it all up: If you're a person who only likes to watch movies like Transformers and The Fast And The Furious, Only God Forgives will be complicated and hard for you to watch, simply because you're not used to using your brain while watching movies. I'm not implying that there's anything wrong with that, I'm just trying to explain what kind of audiences this movie will entertain, and what audiences it won't. Only God Forgives is very artsy and atmospheric, but I don't think it's nearly as pretentious as a lot critiques make it out to be. I strongly believe that Nicolas Winding Refn believes in treating his audience with respect, and by that I mean that he doesn't cram every single plot detail down the throats of the people who are watching his movies.
In the end, Only God Forgives is a must watch for anyone who considers themselves a movie enthusiast. It has some of the best cinematography and camerawork that I've seen in ages, and the way it managed to just suck me in and keep me under its spell for its entire 90 minute duration is impressive to say the least. This film definitely has a lot more style to it than substance, but if that isn't a problem for you, Only God Forgives is sure keep you nailed to your seat. The only reason why I won't be giving it the rating of Movie Magic is that when I think about it, all the movies that I've given that rating in the past are slightly better movies that I just enjoyed watching a little more than this one. Still, I'll definitely be picking Only God Forgives up on BluRay as soon as possible. (5/6)
Only God Forgives IMDb page here
Only God Forgives trailer here
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