You wanna fight?

“I'm a pornographer and I make films about what excites me” is how Nicolas Winding Refn described his working methods at a festival screening of Only God Forgives. At least he's honest. More and more with each successive film, the director of Valhalla Rising, Bronson, and the Pusher trilogy has created works tailor-made for those who long for a more perfect union between the arthouse and the grindhouse, between high art and video nasties.

Refn plays especially fast and loose with matters of character development and plot in his Bangkok-set latest, devoting most of his efforts to a dark melange of tension and horror as he hypnotically charts an American named Julian's (Ryan Gosling) half-hearted attempts to avenge his brother's well-deserved death. Julian is egged on in that endeavour by a domineering, bloodthirsty mother played by Kristin Scott Thomas and hampered at every turn by the karaoke-loving Angel of Vengeance (Vithaya Pansringarm) who pulls the criminal underworld's strings.

Insofar as it not only recalls but doubles down on the garish aesthetics and ultra-violence of Refn's last film, this is very much the followup to Drive—sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The Danish filmmaker's slick exteriors have never been more marvellous to behold, but neither have the insides ever been so brutal and ugly.

There are no dreamy interludes to offset the horrendous acts of cruelty this time around. Where in previous films the characters' monosyllabic back-and-forth and intentionally stilted line reading were part of a rich sensory texture, here they more often fall flat and hang in the air. Refn is moving toward an almost non-verbal approach in which dialogue is used the way title cards were in the silent era: only when the visuals themselves aren't sufficient in conveying what the film is getting at, which in this case is extremely rare. Almost all the elements that made Drive palatable have been excised, reducing a once-tempting apple to little more than cyanide-laced seeds.

In that sense Only God Forgives is the more honest work, but its lack of flair makes the inherent silliness (which also coloured Drive) much harder to ignore. Refn has also called himself a “fetishist” in interviews, but “somnambulist” might be a better description: it's as though he's lifted entire sequences from his dreams and/or fantasies wholesale and couldn't be bothered to add normal connective tissue when transposing them onto the screen. This isn't a bad thing. The writer-director's avowed fairytale influence notwithstanding, what Only God Forgives offers isn't so much a story as a trip; it's probably easiest for the viewer to not resist his concoction and simply go with the flow. There's nothing profound here, but the visual form these occasionally half-baked concepts take on is ravishing. Refn assembles his set-pieces the way a fashion photographer might; visual splendour comes at the expense of narrative plausibility.

If not all of the plot contrivances therein feel fully believable, it could be because they've been plucked from Refn's subconscious and would make more sense if interpreted as dreams rather than as pieces of a streamlined narrative. To take almost anything that happens in Only God Forgives literally is to ignore the fact that it obviously exists in a heightened reality of Refn's own making, and while that fact doesn't excuse its more glaring flaws—casual racism being the most obvious—it does go a long way toward making sense of the ways in which, to Refn at least, said shortcomings are also utterly beside the point. Much of this is juvenile and self-indulgent, to be sure, but it's almost always mesmerising as well.

One such moment—a semi-climactic fistfight between Julian and the Angel of Vengeance—takes place under the long shadow of a marble pugilist, an impossible ideal of masculinity and strength to which our mama's boy of a protagonist can never live up. The dynamic between the two is not unlike that between Llewelyn Moss and Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men: in-over-his-head protagonist on one side of the coin, seemingly indestructible agent of fate on the other.

There's a sense here, just as there was in the Coen Brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's excellent novel, that once something has been set in motion it must be carried out to its bloody conclusion. Julian doesn't land a single punch in the fight and, all the while, his mother watches on. This is all very Oedipal, the kind of silly fantasia you have to consciously get on board with in order to enjoy (see also Kim Ki-duk's Pieta, which shares this film's oedipal fixation and tendency to settle scores via hacked-off limbs). And yet something about Only God Forgives makes you want to do just that. Refn has emerged in recent years as an immediately identifiable stylist, and few other filmmakers working today can put together such a striking series of images. He may put his unique aesthetic to questionable use at times, but the results are always worth poring over.