Only God Forgives - Cinema Review

Only God Forgives is at least the most interesting film I’ve seen recently. It’s arguably an art film with sinister blood running through its veins, although I find it better described as a stylised crime thriller, similar both thematically and aesthetically to Sin City. They also both contain a range of different main characters interpretable as the central protagonist. The film starts with a disturbing young man called Billy committing several violent and sexual crimes that slowly spiral into a dangerous web of revenge involving the local law enforcement and Billy’s relatives and their criminal contacts. 

This is a film that treats the characters and the audience on the same level of intelligence. The characters can almost sense the impending danger, the growing tension and the hidden subtext in the scenes. The audience is also told just enough information for you to work out the motivations and potentials for the next sequence of events.  The dialogue is, for the most part, incredibly sparse but at the same time very telling.

The film is so reserved in its delivery of information that it’s probably possible to interpret the events in many different ways but for the sake of prefixing everything with “possibly” and “in my opinion” I will just run with my interpretation of events. Probably shouldn’t have to say that what with the title of the whole damn blog as it is.

Ryan Gosling’s character of Julian is a man torn between his ruthless family and a deeply suppressed sense of morality, quickly finding the two are completely incompatible. He’s one of the quietest characters making most of his conversation with subtle turns of the head or sustained distant staring. It makes the times he does talk all the more compelling and his character has a great deal of depth, contending highly for the role of central protagonist. At times he is as thuggish as his devilish brother Billy and yet at other times he seems to have compassion and a powerful love for others, especially his mother, whose relationship with her sons is unsettlingly intimate.

The mother herself has probably the most dialogue of anyone in the film in a role as mouthy manipulative matriarch and criminal kingpin with dangerous contacts. She is the only character reasonably built up as a potential threat to the otherwise unassailable senior police officer and their eventual confrontation is sadly somewhat anticlimactic.

The imposing senior police officer is a conundrum of a character, proving to be a caring family man one minute, a merciless harbinger of hard justice the next, and a karaoke singer in the spaces in between.

You thought i was joking?

He’s not unlike Batman with his brutal unflinching punishments of criminality and almost all of the other characters either fear or respect him. It’s a definite talking point as to whether his means justify the ends, especially as the stakes raise and his punishments only become more savage and torturous. 

The lighting is exceptionally striking in terms of both colour and shadowing and many frames of the film will linger in the memory long after the closing credits. There are a myriad of patterns at play in the background of every scene but one of the more prominent themes is that of lines hiding and exposing different parts of a character. Sharp horizontal shadows sometimes cut everything but the eyes from view and at other times paint a person’s features in several different shades at once.

If the methodical plot pacing asks too much from your patience the visuals alone are reason to stick with the film. That said, a couple did walk out about half an hour into the showing I saw. I suspect they were lured in by Gosling’s body and were expecting something easier on the eye and mind. 

Speaking of which, the film is particularly violent and doesn’t always shy away from showing the gore explicitly. Much of the polarising controversy I heard beforehand surrounding the film seemed to centre on this aspect but I feel the filmmakers were mostly purposeful in their depiction of the gory acts. This I think may swing the deal as to whether you enjoy the film or not but I will say it’s not like going to see a Saw film where the insides are all over the outsides, it’s a more precise brutality that makes you wince rather than gag.

Overall I recommend the film for those looking for something dark and challenging as well as those who enjoy their crime dramas with generous helpings of suspense. Strangely I feel no polar definitive conclusion on the film personally, rather instead that it’s an intriguing deep well of a film with a lot to offer but not ideal for those afraid of getting their feet wet…basically it’s good.