Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn | Written by Refn and Esti Giordani | 110 min | ▲
If you’ve ever had the experience of putting a glass of milk to your lips when its gone off, only to realize what’s happened when the sour swill is in your mouth, then that’ll give you a sense of watching this film. It inspires a cruel and childish impulse to ask a friend to try it to see the revolted expression on their face, but also to confirm its wretchedness.
I’ve long been a fan of the Winding Refn of Drive and The Neon Demon, where his stylistic experiments were always as interesting as they were terminally self-conscious. Even in the much maligned Only God Forgives I found things to enjoy. But after a decade away from feature filmmaking where he instead made series work, he’s emerged with an unwatchable mess of a picture; hyper-stylized sets, costumes, and woozy camerawork, deliberate and maybe even hypnotic — but all amounting to nothing.
At first it seems like it might be a comedy — nothing pitched this ridiculously arch could possibly be taken seriously. But, no. The story, such as it is, is set in a dreamlike future city as seen from the ’60s, swaddled in fog, where Elle (Sophie Thatcher) is an actor about to start work on a Barbarella– or Danger: Diabolik-styled feature.
She’s miserable, more so when a giddy starlet, Hunter (Kristine Froseth) joins her on the picture. Elle resents her father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), a sleazy producer who went and married one of Elle’s besties, Dominique (Havana Rose Liu). They’re all terrified of a supernatural serial killer who preys on women, Leather Man.
We also get a parallel story of Private K (Charles Melton), who lives in a (foggy, natch’) city in a post-war Japan where all the cop cars are 1960s Porsche 911s. His daughter has been abducted by the Leather Man and he’s prowling the night to find her, murdering Yakuza thugs when appropriate. The violence is the only thing that suggests the film could have any depth, but it’s not nearly consistent enough to engage.
Winding Refn’s style has devolved from deeply David Lynch-influenced to a parody of the same, which instead ends up feeling inspired by the Vaseline-glazed camerawork of 1970s soft-core porn pictures and the ersatz elegance of the blatantly male gaze, all buttressed by an over-the-top score of strings. (Apparently the Danish filmmaker has admitted he thinks of himself as a pornographer, so there you go.)
To make matters worse, his film seems to be about fathers who are unable to control or protect daughters, and what a tragedy that is, patriarchal failures. That’s a best guess as the film is so disconnected and meandering it’s a challenge to discern if it has a thought in its head at all.
Finally, there’s something so incredibly indulgent in all of this, the rampant pretension of a filmmaker so fascinated by his own empty vision nothing else could possibly matter. He’s challenging his audience to relate while not caring if we do. I guess that sounds kind of punk if you think about it, and maybe this is what we deserve at the ragged end of western civilization while the world is on fire: art that’s so much about itself and so ridiculously glossy it looks like it’s made by artificial intelligence. What a bore.
