Only God Forgives - Telegraph Those nooks and crannies that aren't splashed in gore are instead drenched in Refn's garish visual sense, which can marshal screen space brilliantly, even as it marks out an extended red-light area, somewhere you might not wish to venture after dark, if indeed at all. Only God Forgives pushes Drive's aesthetics further, into more autistic territory: again it suffers for being organised around Gosling, now less a performer than an especially slow-moving billboard, a pair of zeitgeisty quotation marks with nothing very much going on between them. Refn's earlier films - the Pusher trilogy (1996-2005), Bleeder (1999), even 2008"s not unflashy Bronson - had a surer feel for consequence. Their deep-rooted understanding of criminal cause-and-effect is what distinguished this director from that unhappy glut of pre-millennial Tarantino copyists. Somewhere beyond the new film's bloody surfaces, we might perhaps discern a parable of bad parenting. We're invited to view Billy and Julian's issues as attributable to their mother (Kristin Scott Thomas), who shows up for Act Two in full Paris Hilton garb, foul-mouthed, ruthlessly self-centred, and prone to comparing her sons" genitals over dinner. Scott Thomas has never been so inelegant on screen, which is another jolt, but the role proves more Alexis Carrington than Medea. This woman's just vile, and here you sense Refn playing into the hands of exactly those resentful male loners who might enjoy these kinds of vengeance fantasies. Whether a boy is too much of a brute or not brutal enough, it is, apparently, the mother's fault. Now that's what I call vaginal misrepresentation.