Briliant and ultra-stylized visuals don’t compensate for the fact that Nicolas Winding Refn forgot to do one thing in making Only God Forgives — make a compelling story.

Only God Forgives is the reteaming of Ryan Gosling with writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn following the excellent Drive in 2011. While Drive was a very quiet, contemplative crime drama, Only God Forgives is so quiet it makes Drive seem like it was written by Aaron Sorkin. There is very, very little dialogue in this film. For very large portions it is practically a silent film. Ryan Gosling stars here as Julian, a Thai-Boxing instructor and drug smuggler living in Bangkok who is pressured into avenging his brother’s justifiable murder (His brother raped and murdered the daughter of the man who killed him) by his very controlling and evil mother (Kristen Scott Thomas).

Gosling is excellent as always here playing Julian.  He is extremely disturbed and is almost like a little boy mentally.  He is afraid to touch girls, although he is addicted to private sessions with strippers.  It would be fantastic if he was given more to work with here, such as the scene where he explains to the prostitute he hired to pretend she was his girlfriend why he lets his mother control him.  The explosion of Julian made me excited to see where he was going to go from there, but he was pretty much done speaking for the rest of the film at that point.

Kristen Scott Thomas definitely deserves an extra shout out for completely stealing the film as Crystal, Julian’s mother. She commands the screen the moment she steps into frame and totally dominates every scene she is in. She is pretty much the only character that has any dialogue in the film, but she relishes the truly sociopathic Crystal and brings her to life here.

Refn is quite brilliant in the way he crafts his scenes here. Every shot is very deliberate and shows perfect technique. He films the violence as beautiful and poetic mixed with pure brutality. He experiments the entire way through, taking the quiet narrative of Drive and taking it as far as he possible can here. And that is the biggest problem with the film — It is extremely indulgent. Refn uses every technique here basically to show off, as there is very little story that he is serving. The directing is superb, but to what end?

As for the story, Refn was also experimenting. He took a rather clichèd revenge story and then wanted to see what would happen if you put this in the real world. Without getting into spoilers, it just completely falls flat. It doesn’t really make you think about what you just saw other than to just say “What the fuck?” as you are walking out of the theater.

Conclusion [7 out of 10]

This is an excellent film school film of a first time director learning what he can do in film making and showing it off in a small independent feature in order to to get future deals. The problem here is that Refn is not a first time filmmaker.  He dedicates the film to Alejandro Jodorowski, and I admit that I do not have familiarity with his work.  Do I just not get what Refn is doing here?  That is entirely possible.  I will say that I would very much recommend this film to anyone who has a film making desire, or simply loves to study filming technique and great cinematography.  I would not recommenced it as a movie to entertain you.   Drive had a lot of critical success, and most fans were very anxious waiting to see what he would do to tell his next story. After seeing his film school project, we are still waiting.