Julian has fled to Bangkok where he has a large Thai Boxing sports center, matchmaking and betting assembly line as a front for a major drug trade. His mother, (a representation of Megera, erinyes from classical mythology), is the head of a mafia organization and returns to her eldest son Billy to bring him justice. The little boy has indeed raped and killed yet another underage prostitute with the motto "I'm going to meet the devil." This time he was executed by a policeman with a personal and distinct sense of right and wrong.

The lady demands that Julian give him justice as her son "may have had his reasons for doing so."

Julian is inadequate to stand up for himself, to emancipate himself, to love, and his mother knows this and brutally repeats it to him, emphasizing her envy and sense of inferiority to her brother.

Bangkok has rules beyond capacity.

There is nothing to explain and little to say: the dialogues are as essential as in the best Westerns.

But there is everything to see; an Asian film made by a Danish transplanted to America that speculatively recounts a family tragedy: a devouring mother, a symbol of something that prevents one from taking ownership of one's own existence; a dispenser of wealth like life but an archetype of opposite valences because the lust for power and money, she arrogates the right of life and death over anyone, because she demands absolute loyalty and will not tolerate anyone betraying her.

In order to lead a healthy and innocent life, it is necessary to destroy the devouring mother that dwells within us, and this Winding Refn tells as well as Tarantino did with Beatrix in Kill Bill.

Here again there are swords and as a good Jodorowskian also psychomagic and some Freudian legacies.

The film, a magical contemporary art installation in shades of hell/blood red, electric blue at times baroque but above all minimalist, does not hesitate to descend into Greek-style tragedy, with Asian settings ranging from Sion Sono to Kim Ki Duk, from Takeshi Miike to Park Chan Wook, from Takeshi Kitano to Tarantino.

Masterful slow-motion sequence plans in a sword-and-machine gun revenge film. Mesmerizing photography for a world where hell reigns and "if only God forgives" is now Nietzschean dead.

If man no longer hears, sees and listens with his mind then the only option is to inflict pain with the body that is skewered, deafened and blinded. Penalty the latter inflicted by Oedipus on himself who pierced his eyes with his wife-mother's pin.

Fragmented narrative of the same myth/complex that does not hesitate to retrieve Freud in his game of persecution, justice, revenge that will allow his son to free himself from the burden of maternal penetration.

The magic of cinema, an emblem of contemporary art that becomes Greek tragedy, mythology, psychoanalysis; it becomes alienation between wealth and poverty; it becomes aesthetics of irremediable horror.

An enchanted world of torment and ecstasy the cinema of Wending Refn; the madness of genius, of research, of the abyss.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice