Review: Lost River

Lost River, actor Ryan Gosling's directorial debut, is an admirable work though not necessarily for the reasons one might suspect. It is one hundred steps beyond the sanest stretches of indulgence, and pretentious to boot. Yet many, in fact most, of its individual pieces intrigue even as they refuse to settle into anything resembling coherence.

Gosling has gone out on a very shaky limb, and his gutsiness is to be applauded. He possesses a keen visual eye, and he is unabashed in his cinematic influences - Lost River bears the spiritual handprints of David Lynch, Harmony Korine, Dario Argento, Billy Wilder, Georges Franju, and Gosling collaborators Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) and Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives), to name but a few. It's a curse and a credit to Gosling, who could do worse than to kneel before those directors' altars but who most definitely needs to find his own voice and further strengthen his command of the medium.

Lost River is a slice of American gothic in which the American Dream is literally and figuratively crumbling around the few remaining inhabitants of the fictional town of the title. Single mother of two Billy (Christina Hendricks), behind on her mortgage payments and desperate to hang onto her home, accepts a job offered by her bank manager Dave (Ben Mendelsohn). Her teenage son Bones (Iain De Caestecker) does what he can to help, going round from one abandoned house to another to strip copper wire. This gets him in trouble with local nutjob Bully (Matt Smith), who has a penchant for gold-sequined jackets and slicing off people's lips with scissors. Smith, best known for his turn as Doctor Who, utilises his gawky presence to unsettling effect, especially in a scene in which he suggestively asks to touch Rat's (Saoirse Ronan) pet rat. The scene, which has the thug threatening to darken the innocent's sexuality, pays homage to Willem Dafoe's far disturbing symbolic deflowering of Laura Dern in Lynch's Wild at Heart.

Lost River is chock full of dreamy imagery - a flaming bike rolling past Bones, the glamorous decay of the derelict buildings, Ronan's face lit by the flamingo pink neon - but none are as striking as the ones set in the house of horrors club run by Dave. Here is where the most perverse and demented entertainment is luridly presented. The glorious Eva Mendes slinks into each frame only to be knifed and bathed in blood like some Dario Argento victim. Her wink at the end of one performance may be the film's best and most lighthearted moment. Billy, peeling off a layer of skin to expose the muscle beneath, references Franju's Eyes Without a Face for her onstage performance.

Mendelsohn, who seems to be everywhere these days, is delectably sinister as the ringmaster of the flagrantly grotesque cabaret club. Whether crooning Hank Williams' "Cool Water" or dancing before rubbing against an encased Hendricks, the Australian actor provides the film with its most hypnotically disturbing moments.

Willfully abstract, Lost River is a promising if flawed showing from Gosling. The carefully composed images are striking, but nothing breathes within the frame. Still, this hypersaturated fractured fairy tale contains enough bizarrely interesting elements to be a future midnight movie mainstay.

Lost River

Directed by: Ryan Gosling

Written by: Ryan Gosling

Starring: Christina Hendricks, Ben Mendelsohn, Iain De Caestecker, Eva Mendes, Saoirse Ronan, Matt Smith, Barbara Steele, Reda Kateb