It may not win the Palme D'Or, but it could win the Walkout D'Or, a gold trophy of a cinema-seat banged up into the upright position. Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives is a glitteringly strange, mesmeric and mad film set among American criminal expatriates in Bangkok.

It is ultraviolent, creepy and scary, an enriched-uranium cake of pulp, with a neon sheen. The first scenes made me think that Wong Kar-wai had made a new film called In the Mood for Fear or In the Mood for Hate.

Ryan Gosling plays Julian, the co-owner of a Muay Thai boxing club with his brother Billy (Tom Burke): an operation which is a front for selling drugs. Both brothers are naturally angry and violent, though in keeping his feelings in check, Julian is of course by far the more unsettling.

When Billy indulges his taste for violence and misogynist hate one night, and is himself murdered by his victim's father, Julian realises that he is expected to discharge the gangster's ultimate responsibility: revenge. But a twinge of conscience, or a twist of pain at the memory of those misdeeds which drove him from America in the first place, won't let him kill.

This inability brings two terrifying people into his life and into the movie: one is Julian's mother Crystal, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, enraged at Julian's pathetic disloyalty. The other is the mysterious plainclothes police officer Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm), who roams the streets armed with a sword: a sharia-samurai of justice. It is the impassive Chang who first discovered Billy's victim and for enigmatic reasons of his own, created the situation in which Julian found himself agonisingly incapable of that payback his mother expects.

Chang could be a Zen master, whose vocation is to proselytise for the futility of revenge. He could be that god who insists that vengeance is solely his and only he will repay. Or he could be the ultimate sadist and tyrant, a Machiavel with a telepathic sense of how his victims are to be drawn into his power. Either way, Julian — clenched and unhappy in the three-piece suit he has put on for a dinner date with his mother, and never takes off — realises he has to challenge Chang to a fight.



The film exerts an eerie and woozy grip from the outset, with many nightmarish scenes of people walking down long, claustrophobic corridors, somehow always pulsing with dark red and green light, like the subway in Gaspar Noé's Irréversible or the tenement corridor in Scorsese's Taxi Driver. There are some deeply disturbing karaoke club scenes, with crooning songs about unrequited love. (Winding Refn may also have taken something from the British film-maker Thomas Clay, and his Bangkok-set film Soi Cowboy.) Larry Smith's cinematography, Beth Mickle's production design, and the art direction by Russell Barnes and Witoon Suanyai are staggeringly good.



And however incredible this sounds, Only God Forgives has moments of great subtlety. When Julian has to go for dinner with his mother, he clearly anticipates it will be an occasion in which Crystal will pitilessly humiliate him about his cowardice and the size of his penis. So he brings along as his date the prostitute for whom he is a regular: Maï (Yayaying Rhatha Phongam).

Maï's face shows how touched and moved she is when she realises Julian wants him to meet his mother — and then quietly, deeply wounded when Julian says that they must "pretend to be a couple". It is only Maï who emerges from the dinner, and indeed the movie, with any dignity and self-respect.

There is another fascinating touch: when Chang is himself under threat, and must hit back against those tormentors employed by Crystal, he finds himself in what appears to be a cinema storeroom surrounded by reels of film, and will impose his violent authority on the manager, who is there with his boy. It is this boy who makes a strange, almost involuntary gesture with his hand towards his back, and a fraction of a second later we realise what is happening: Chang is about to unsling his sword. For some reason, I thought of the scene from Macbeth in which Banquo is slain in front of his child.



Only God Forgives will, understandably, have people running for the exits, and running for the hills. It is very violent, but Winding Refn's bizarre infernal creation, an entire created world of fear, really is gripping. Every scene, every frame, is executed with pure formal brilliance. I'm afraid it's going to be even nastier the next time I watch it.