A batch of new images featuring a battered and bruised Ryan Gosling in director Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives has gone online. Gosling stars as a man who’s been living in exile in Bangkok for the past ten years after killing a cop. He manages a Thai boxing club as a front for a drugs operation and finds himself in hot water after his brother is killed for murdering a prostitute. The boys’ mother arrives in Bangkok to collect her son’s body and instructs Gosling to take revenge and “raise hell.” For fans of Gosling and Refn’s previous collaboration, Drive, this premise should induce a fair amount of anticipation.
The images show a beat-up Gosling pulling off “battered dapper” in his suit, but some footage was shown at the Cannes Film Festival last week and we’ve got a brief description of what went down as well. Hit the jump to check out the images and footage description.
First we’ll get to the footage. Quint over at AICN notes that while Only God Forgives isn’t a sequel to Drive, “it feels like a shared universe.” He continued:
“There are a few Drive touchstones in the footage: long tracking shots, liberal use of neon lighting (in this case purple and green) and a silent, but violent Ryan Gosling. The footage opened with a long dolly shot down a dark and exotic hallway, overlaid with titles in a foreign language I’m pretty sure was Thai.”
Quint goes on to describe in detail the footage they saw, including Gosling sticking his hand in a guy’s mouth and dragging him down a hall by his jaw. Refn himself described the project as a thriller produced as a Western set in the Far East, with a modern cowboy hero. An interesting mash-up of genres to be sure, but it sounds like we’re in for another brutal Gosling/Refn team up and I couldn’t be more excited.
Images are via Kinopoisk and Empire.
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Could this be a spiritual sequel to “Drive”? Or maybe a continuation of the Driver’s character? We don’t know much about the Driver so who’s to say he didn’t manage a Thai boxing ring before setting his sights on LA
I Think that it’s part of a saga that he is making about violent men: Bronson, Valhalla Rising and Drive are also part of that saga, so yeah by the looks of this one it might be a new chapter for that saga.
All his movies feature violent men – the Pusher trilogy no less than those you listed Leo.
I don’t think the characters in the Pusher trilogy were necessarily violent people as much as they were people involved in a violent world (underworld). The main characters of Bronson, One Eye and Driver were seemingly inherently violent by nature.
Well since Drive is a book…. I don’t think so.
It’s a follow-up to a successful collaboration between Gosling & Refn, but it’s certainly not a sequel.
When’s the release date?
there was talk of drive 2 as well. Plus one of the critics who saw this exclusive footage said that this movie appaears to be in the same sort of universe as drive.Refn apparently using a lot of neon green and violet lighting.