Amongst the slew of trivia that is available for the filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, perhaps the most telling notes come from his connection to another Dutch auteur, the notorious, divisive Lars von Trier. Refn’s father, Anders, has been a close collaborator of von Trier’s since the 90s – he was assistant director and second unit director on Dancer in the Dark, and edited Breaking the Waves, von Trier’s sole masterwork in my opinion. Beyond that, von Trier and Refn have, up until very recently, seemingly had a pretty strong friendship, one that occasionally even looked like that of a mentor and a pupil, though I’m sure both men would flatly deny such simplistic encapsulation of their relationship. And yet, Refn does seemingly fit a similar role in the scope of the current world cinema as von Trier once did: a technical, stylish master with a taste for the provocative.

nicolas-winding-refn-ryan-gosling
Image via Radius-TWC

There is undoubtedly an artistic connection as well as personal, but where von Trier tends toward the operatic even in his most ghastly passage – such as in most of Antichrist – Refn is more indebted to the hallmarks of genre. Refn clearly has a love for the likes of Walter Hill and John Carpenter, as well as cult classics like Silent Running and Logan’s Run, a film he was looking to remake for some time; von Trier has grander aspirations as a filmmaker, a compulsive need to make the audience feel something, anything, at the end of his works. Where there’s increasingly not much to enjoy or contemplate in von Trier’s work, Refn’s genre films in arthouse drag have become increasingly bewitching, and contemplative in their dissection of the masculine aesthetic and behavior.

It’s been 20 years since Refn broke onto the scene with the first installment in his Pusher trilogy, which he continued in 2004 and 2005, and the director has consistently honed his technique since his debut in 1996. In Drive, Only God Forgives, and The Neon Demon, his exacting, tightly realized compositions are often so exhaustingly detailed on the surface as to suggest the shallowness and ugly realities of his subjects in the imagery alone – the underworld, the fashion world, the drug trade, and other such dubious enterprises. And though his films have not always resonated or thrilled the ways he’s clearly intended them to, the cinematic worlds he’s created have always been built upon a healthy skepticism about how the world works, from its most celebrated enterprises down to its most insidious.

With The Neon Demon just about to hit theaters, I decided to take a look at Refn’s filmography thus far and rank it from worst to best.

7. 'Only God Forgives'

only-god-forgives-ryan-gosling

In which Ryan Gosling’s near-mute tough guy wanders around Thailand looking to avenge his violent, deviant brother, whose head looks something like a watermelon that’s met the business end of Gallagher’s mallet when we last see him. On a technical level, the movie is a joy to watch for the most part, with Refn fully indulging his flamboyant use of neon and shadow, as well as taking full advantage of the sights and sounds of the foreign land. The story itself, however, is repetitive, dull, and only takes real chances in its use of violence, which comes in often enough but never cuts the way that Drive’s more vicious passages did. Gosling’s character feels like a hash of reactions and calculated movements, none of which make much sense or resonate beyond their shock factor in the scene; in fact, his most tense scenes made me unintentionally chuckle. It’s not an unsalvageable mess, as so many critics have dismissed the film as, but there’s no arguing that this felt like something of an easy-going victory lap after Drive for the director, a neatly stylized but deeply false and wrong-headed vengeance tale.

6. 'Bleeder'

In the case of Refn's second film, Bleeder, masculinity is divided between familial caring and paternal responsibility, in the personages of Louis (Levino Jensen) and Leo (Kim Bodnia of the first Pusher film). Spending his days hustling and hanging out with a lonely video store clerk (Mads Mikkelsen), Leo is the soon-to-be father of Louis' nephew, after impregnating Louis' sister, Louise (Rikke Louise Andersson), which leads to Leo becoming more violent and short-tempered. That's pulp of Refn's story, and as with the Pusher films, he gets more than a few jolts of excitement out of his actors and his tracking shots, as well as the flourishes of violence.

The problem is that Refn's script trades in the most cynical, simplistic depictions of men that you can think of, with Mikkelsen, Bodnia, and Jensen representing three different yet familiar masculine types. If you're not a violent, racist, and abusive sociopath, you're a squirrelly art-nerd that doesn't know the first thing about talking to a woman. The film remains generally intriguing, propulsive in certain passages even, but the drama feels fixed, fascinated by a specific but not particularly original vision of the ruinous impulses of mankind.

5. 'Fear X'

fear-x-jon-turturro

Or, as I’ve been calling it, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Fargo. John Turturro, in a strangely hypnotic performance, plays a mall security guard who is investigating the murder of his wife in what looks to be a random shooting. He travels to Montana where he meets a decorated policeman, played by the great character actor James Remar, who tips him off to the fact that his wife might have been collateral damage in an attempt to quell police corruption. The material is punchy and pulpy, and Refn’s compositions are more fleshed out here, more indicative of the poise he would brandish in Drive and Valhalla Rising. The problem is that the style and the script don’t always mix well, especially in the scenes that don’t involve Turturro. Refn’s pacing and editing suggest the languorous tortures of a psychologically scarred contingency, but the script speaks more to immediate, unbound ideas of betrayal, murder, perversion, and justice. Sam Fuller would have made something tremendous out of this, or maybe even John Carpenter could have made the chill and pain of the story’s turns come through clearer. Even so, there’s no denying that the film is an alluring piece of work, an oddity that presages the big stylistic flourishes that would become the director’s stock and trade.

4. 'Bronson'

bronson-tom-hardy
Image via

Primarily a showcase for the endlessly watchable Tom Hardy, Bronson nevertheless is a film that’s hard to forget. It’s probably Refn’s most outwardly antic movie to date, befitting a story that considers the mania of a caged man who seeks freedom from society and the bars that hold him inside so many prisons. Based on the true story of a career criminal who repeatedly broke out of prisons throughout the UK, the film correlates Hardy’s love of performance, and ability to continuously re-invent himself, with Bronson’s creative and criminal impulses to set himself apart from the morals, governmental rule, and civilization. Where Valhalla Rising is meditative and brooding in its editing and pacing, Bronson is an abrasive assault, anchored ably by Hardy, who puts every ounce of himself into the performance. Even as Refn’s vision goes off the deep end, complete with meta stage performances and all, Hardy remains the consummate entertainer.

3. The 'Pusher' Trilogy

In hindsight, it makes sense that Mads Mikkelsen would have garnered his first bit of major attention partially due to his work as Tonny in Refn’s Pusher films. Now a kind of statuesque villain type, the man who gave Anthony freaking Hopkins a run for his money in the role of Hannibal Lecter, Mikkelsen went softer at first under Refn’s direction as the over-compensating partner to Frank (Kim Bodnia), a low level heroin dealer in Copenhagen who begins the film as a cocky criminal on the rise. The trilogy begins with Frank, who must face his own ugly masculinity when he’s offered the chance to either run off with the love of his life, or sell a large score of dope to reassert himself as a kingpin of sorts.

From there, the series goes onto take a look at Tonny, who is let out of prison toward the beginning of the second installment to possibly take his place in his father’s car-stealing operation and become a decent father to his child. The final installment follows Milo (Zlatko Buric), the dealer that Tonny and Frank intermittently work for, who must balance his life as a popular drug dealer with his family life when he agrees to cook food for his daughter’s birthday. In it’s first two parts, the narrative is propulsive due largely to the actors and Refn’s long-takes, which were still in their chrysalis stage at this point. The power of his formal ability can be felt most during chase and action scenes, such as when Frank gets chased by the police in Pusher or when Tonny and his dad’s crew boost cars from a dealership in Pusher II.

But Pusher III is only remarkable in Buric’s performance, which shows the chronically haggard life of a major criminal and the oblivion that seems to be constantly in sight for men like Milo. Refn’s filmmaking makes offers him an ample stage but there’s less personality here, less intimate connection, and one has to believe because Refn was a young man telling an old man’s story in this case. There’s that old saying that there should be an age limit for directing Macbeth, that its not a tale that a young man can fully understand in its eruptive, harrowing nuances of tragedy and wisdom. I can feel something similar with Pusher III, the story of a longtime addict and facilitator who, though only really middle-aged, has lived a life that would make young men’s hair go shining white.

2. 'Valhalla Rising'

Valhalla Rising is Refn’s most outlandish adventure to date, a Kubrick-Malick-Trier-inspired slab of age-old brutality detailed with a pensive, amazed distance that is at once an instrument of beauty and a binding element of the production. Mads Mikkelsen reunites with his Pusher director to play One-Eye, a bloodied Norse warrior in the age of Vikings, being held captive in the hills of Scotland. After an epic battle, One-Eye escapes and is accompanied by a young boy, who does not go by a name but takes to the lonely brute quickly. There are times where Refn tips over into portentousness here, moments where his slow gazes at the serene yet unforgiving landscapes of nature feels like expert thumb-twiddling, but on the whole, Valhalla Rising works incredibly well. The violence is done tastefully but not in a way as to shield the ugliness of the act, and there’s no distinctly false feeling of following some vague almighty; in fact, One-Eye could be seen as a creature apart from God. At the heart of the film, like so many other Refn works, is the question of what makes a man, and here he considers the nature vs. nurture debate, though he doesn’t push his narrative or his ideas far enough into the abstract. Still, as far as adventure movies go, the aughts offered few stories as weirdly succinct, memorable, and impactful as Valhalla Rising, and few battered heroes towered over others with as much assuredness as Mikkelsen.

1. 'Drive'

drive-ryan-gosling-image-4
Image via FilmDistrict

Inspired, at least partially, by Walter Hill’s fantastic The Driver, Refn’s first collaboration with Ryan Gosling came on like an opium-fueled nightmare of Los Angeles, the middle ground between the dark, elevated wonder of Mulholland Drive and the tough-minded acumen of Hill’s masterpiece. The filmmaker’s use of audio – the baseball game in the opening robbery sequence – and his overall sense of visual pacing give the film a kind of effortlessness that is not easy to pitch, and yet Refn arrived in the space with little warning outside of Valhalla Rising and Fear X. One could watch this film on silent and be enraptured by its imagery and visual rhythms alone.

Thankfully, Refn doesn’t just let the aesthetic dreaminess of his film tire itself out. Drive takes time to indulge interruptive excursions that both feel rooted in a kind of real-world knowledge and shake people out of the hypnotic splendor of the visuals. When Gosling’s hero stomps the man’s face into a pile of shattered bone, organs, and blood, there’s a full sense that Gosling’s character is a homicidal maniac, who just so happens to fight for the “good guys.” He’s not the sensitive soul that Gosling’s natural good looks and quiet demeanor would suggest, but rather a crazed man who falls for his neighbor (Carey Mulligan). Similarly, Albert Brooks gives a scene-stealing performance as a crime boss who is far more cordial, human, and unpredictable than any gangster character I can recall, discussing his choices in Chinese food and assuaging the power-hungry nastiness that is so often the carrying card for any crime film’s major villain.

Yes, the film spawned a legion of assholes who thing Gosling’s character is the most manly man that ever manned on Planet Man, many of whom have put hard-earned money into idiotic-looking scorpion jackets, but that’s more fandom than movie. Stacked with similarly complicated characters played by the likes of Oscar Isaac, Ron Perlman, and Bryan Cranston, Drive is the kind of genre film that redefines the parameters of genre filmmaking, a work that at once embodies and questions the roots of genre entertainment and style. For some, it remains only thinly interested in what’s roiling underneath, but for me, this is Refn’s masterwork, and I look forward to seeing similarly sinister spectacles from him in the years to come.

drive-ryan-gosling-image-4
Image via FilmDistrict