Image via Film District / RADiUS-TWC

Nicholas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives exhibits the rare space between high art and low trash. A Jodorowsky-by-way-of-Malick—or a Malick-by-way-of-Jodorowsky, depending on where your cinephilia allegiances lie—Only God Forgives finds the Drive and Bronson director experimenting with style and surrealism far more than he’s ever done before (though a close second would be his sleek, minimalistic Viking epic Valhalla Rising, which follows a similar threadbare narrative). Unfortunately, the results tend to be far more cloying and silly than they are genre-bending or revelatory.

Refn re-teams with his Drive star Ryan Gosling in a role which requires even less line memorization than his nameless character in Drive. In fact, he only has 17 lines in the whole film, and delivers them with such emotionless gusto, a cardboard Gosling cutout could have played the role to similar effect. Only God Forgives is an exercise in style over substance. And although the style is breathtakingly gorgeous at times, the film’s utter lack of substance just makes it all the more exhausting.

Set in the lush, vibrant, and seedy underbelly of Bangkok, Gosling’s stoic anti-hero Julien runs a kickboxing club with his unhinged older brother, Billy (Tom Burke). Of course, the kickboxing club is just a front for Julien and Billy’s more insidious drug-dealing venture, which puts them in company with Thailand’s skeeviest gangsters. When things go south for the brothers when Billy is killed after raping and murdering a 16-year-old, Julien is forced to take over the family business and—with added pressure from his diabolically controlling mother (a delightfully maniacal Kristin Scott Thomas) who suddenly arrives in town—to avenge his brother’s death.

But revenge doesn’t come so easy for Julien. As it so happens, Billy’s killer is the father of the girl he killed, a frail, mild-mannered restaurant owner who’s allowed vengeance only because the sinister police Lieutenant Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm)—known as the “Angel of Death”—sanctions it.

What follows is a surreal, nightmarish cat-and-mouse game wherein cinematographer Larry Smith’s hellish, acid-soaked aesthetics, combined with a pulsating, synth-heavy score from regular Refn collaborator Cliff Martinez adds to the voyage-through-hell allegorical narrative trajectory that serves as something resembling a plot.

That the imagery is so breathtakingly gorgeous at times, it’s easy to want to forgive its major narrative flaws, but make no mistake, Only God Forgives is merely torture porn wrapped up in a shiny art house gloss. Graphic brutality, gore, and cringe-worthy torture scenes are stylized through slow-motion sequences, unique framing, and harsh lighting. The severing of limbs and penetration of flesh is depicted is glorified as divine acts.

Gosling broods through scene after scene, blank-eyed and stone-faced as he ventures on a violent, bloody warpath to track down the elusive Lieutenant Chang. And while the narrative slips between reality and fever dream-like sequences, the only thing that’s clear is that neither seems to shed any light on Julien’s vacant characterization.

The only really background that peeks into Julien’s character comes courtesy of Kristin Scott Thomas’s Crystal, whose crass scene-stealing moments hint at incest and reveal a deep-seeded Oedipus complex lurking in Julien’s psyche. Other than that, he’s just as emotionless and driven as a shark viciously tracking the scent of blood.

Refn is a devilishly demented and gifted auteur. He’s gone on record to say that he has a pornographic fetish for violence and violent images, and with Only God Forgives, it clearly shows. But whereas his previous films like Drive, The Pusher trilogy, Bronson, and Valhalla Rising worked because it merely hinted at his fetish for violence; a mastery of how to contain and hold back on that fetish for maximum thematic effect.

But Only God Forgives is Refn’s brutal orgy of violence. Scenes are merely strung together to segue from one violent, bloody outburst to the next. That the neon-soaked, vibrant mise-en-scène of most scenes in Only God Forgives could be framed and hung in the National Portrait Gallery merely serves to disguise the fact that Refn’s really just strung together a fairly boring narrative and is trying to pass it off as “art.”

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Only God Forgives
Directed and written by Nicholas Winding Refn
With Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Vithaya Pansringarm
Rated R because, hey girl, it’s pretty violent.
Opens today at the AFI Silver Theatre and Angelika Film Center Mosaic