Lost Riv­er

This is the stuff that memes are made off. Com­posed as a series of increas­ing­ly abstract non sequiturs, Ryan Gosling’s direc­to­r­i­al debut bor­rows the dirt-smudged sub­ur­ban decay of Gum­mo, the macabre eroti­cism of Blue Vel­vet, the karaōke kitsch of Only God For­gives and the fuzzy Cajun col­lo­qui­al­ism of Beasts of the South­ern Wild and boils them down into a mind-bog­gling dime-store fantasia.

The dystopi­an plot loose­ly con­cerns a teenag­er named Bones (Iain De Caesteck­er), who wears a grub­by white tee and per­ma­nent con­fused frown and strips cop­per from derelict build­ings to sup­port his dear ma (Christi­na Hen­dricks), all the while attempt­ing to evade Cadil­lac-cruis­ing gang­land deviant, Bul­ly (Matt Smith). Along the way, Bones dis­cov­ers a hid­den reser­voir with a row of street lights pen­e­trat­ing the eeri­ly calm sur­face. His neigh­bour (Saoirse Ronan) informs him that a once pros­per­ous town now sits at the bot­tom of it, and so, nat­u­ral­ly, he investigates.

Nico­las Wind­ing Refn, Gosling’s reg­u­lar col­lab­o­ra­tor and cre­ative kin­dred spir­it, revealed in an inter­view with LWLies that every film he makes starts with a sin­gle image. In the case of Only God For­gives, it was ​“of a man look­ing at his hands and very slow­ly balling them into fists.”

If Gosling mim­ic­ked that approach, it’s hard to tell what his jump­ing off point was. Was it the image of Matt Smith spin­ning around in a gold-sequined jack­et repeat­ed­ly yelling ​“look at my mus­cles”? Or maybe it was Ben Mendel­sohn croon­ing in a sub-Lynchi­an BDSM night­club? Per­haps it was the image of an emo’d‑up Saoirse Ronan gen­tly sob­bing while clutch­ing the head of her recent­ly decap­i­tat­ed pet rat, Nick.

Regard­less of how painful­ly self-aware these scenes are, Lost Riv­er is enjoy­ably wacky in places, and it’s hard not to admire Gosling’s mav­er­ick approach to basic nar­ra­tive structure.