Only God Forgives · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man stands in a red corridor with his arms at his sides, looking at his own hands as if they belonged to someone else. That posture is the whole of Only God Forgives. Julian runs a Muay Thai club where no one fights for sport. His brother has raped and murdered a girl and been killed for it. His mother wants blood. Julian could act. He does not. He watches. He stands in front of mirrors and does not move.

Gilles Deleuze had a name for the figure who can no longer act on what he sees: the seer, the voyant. In the cinema Deleuze called the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it — the avenger avenges, cause closes onto effect. Refn lays out every ingredient of that revenge thriller and then jams the mechanism. Julian perceives the situation completely. He simply cannot discharge it into action. What he meets instead are pure optical situations — opsigns — images he can only look at: his brother's body, his mother's face, his own reflection. The drama stops being something that happens and becomes something endured.

Notice what this does to time. The dossier is exact: the long takes are 'not neorealist patience but pressure.' This is the hinge. André Bazin praised the long take in postwar Italian cinema for letting reality breathe, for trusting the world to reveal itself in real duration. Refn keeps the duration and removes the trust. Editor Matthew Newman lets cuts arrive slightly late, 'after the image has already given everything,' holding on an empty corridor 'until the vacancy acquires menace.' These corridors are any-spaces-whatever — Deleuze's term for spaces emptied of their job as a setting for action, fragmented until what is left is pure affect. Bangkok is not a location here. The dossier says it has been 'effectively rebuilt as a stage set,' its real geography dissolved into color-coded rooms.

And the color does the feeling for us. When the red of the club floods the frame, it is not describing a wall; it is the affect itself, loosed from any face that might own it. Deleuze called this the affective colour — a color that absorbs the scene and its emotion into itself. Refn and cinematographer Larry Smith took the lesson straight from Argento's Suspiria, where red corridors stopped being rooms and became dread, and pushed the saturation past it.

The mirrors are where the film names its own secret. The mother is called Crystal — and Deleuze's image for a world folded entirely inward is the crystal. In a crystal-image, present and reflection can no longer be told apart; the actual face and its mirror double trade places. Julian 'confronts his reflection before and after significant events'; the film's whole concern with 'narcissism, doubling, and the mother-son mirror dynamic is externalized in literal reflective surfaces.' This is a saturated crystal — an enclosed, mirror-lined world with no outside. No exit from the family, none from Bangkok, none from the reflection. Even the avenging god, Chang, is something the world produces from inside itself.

Beneath the glassy stillness, something older is grinding. Deleuze described a cinema of impulses — naturalism, where under the social surface a savage 'originary world' of pure drives erupts and everything slides down an irreversible slope toward exhaustion and death. Crystal is that originary world made flesh: the devouring mother who preferred her monstrous son, who measures her living son against the dead one's body. The plot's true engine is not justice but appetite, compulsion, shame. And the slope runs one way — toward the final image of amputation and submission, the hands the film fixed on from the first frame finally offered up.

Which is why the film has, as the dossier puts it, 'not a climax — a ceremony.' The thriller's decisive act is replaced by rite: Chang's punishments carried out with 'liturgical calm,' each one 'prepared and concluded.' Violence here is not acted but figured, staged as sacrament. This is the inheritance Refn took from Jodorowsky's El Topo, where the hero's submission to a greater force is the destination rather than the conflict, and from the masked underworld rite of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, which Smith himself had photographed. Julian's last gesture — kneeling, offering his hands — is what Deleuze called a gest: a posture that lays bare the whole relation the film is about. The body stops doing and starts meaning.

What Refn made is a revenge film with the revenge surgically removed — the genre's motor still on the table, no longer running. From Tarkovsky's Stalker he took duration as weight rather than information; from Mulholland Drive, the idea that evil could be a property of the image's grammar before it is ever a plot point. He carried it forward into the mirror-world of The Neon Demon. The complaint at Cannes — that nothing happens — is exactly right and exactly the point. Watch it again knowing that Julian is a seer and not a hero, that Crystal is a crystal, that the red is the feeling and not the wall. The film stops being a thriller that fails and becomes a ceremony that holds. Then sit with the question it leaves standing in the corridor: when a man can see everything and do nothing, who is left to act? Only a god. Only God forgives, because only God still moves.