Lost River (2015)
Directed by Ryan Gosling
Billy, a single mother of two, is led into a macabre underworld while her teenage son, Bones, discovers a secret road leading to an underwater town. Both Billy and Bones must dive deep into the mystery if their family is to survive.
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9 films that influenced Lost River
What critics say influenced Lost River
Italian horror is another clear touchstone: The music, by frequent Refn collaborator Johnny Jewel, nods overtly to Goblin’s iconic Suspiria score, and Rat’s mute grandmother, perpetually bathed in the flicker of an old projector, is played by aged Black Sunday star Barbara Steele.
In the catacombs of Mendelsohn’s club, Billy walks through hazy red corridors extremely reminiscent of both Only God Forgives and Suspiria ; a ride in a taxi towards the end of the film recalls the gorgeous rain sequence in Argento’s Inferno .
At a minimum, Lost River offers a vivid peek into Gosling’s Netflix queue, filled as it is with a polyglot of references that include the films of David Lynch (especially Wild At Heart and Blue Velvet), David Gordon Green, and Harmony Korine, nods to Mario Bava’s Black Sunday and Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face, and much of the underworld texture of his frequent collaborator, Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives).
Likewise, Mendelsohn can be entrancing, channeling his creep’s most disturbing tendencies, but it will mostly remind you of the better ways that Lynch has incorporated similar figures in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart.
If Wild at Heart is David Lynch’s surreal and oversexed take on The Wizard of Oz, then Ryan Gosling’s debut as a feature filmmaker, Lost River, is a dour and depressing dissection of the Brothers Grimm.
An early shot of the redheaded Hendricks lifting her child skyward is basically a direct homage to The Tree Of Life .
Sure, there are the too-close-for-comfort shadings of Refn, the women-in-distress tableaus of Lynch, and a wholesale burning-house theft from Lost Highway that might be unforgiveable had Lynch not lifted it from Aldrich and Kiss Me Deadly in the first place.
Unlike Lynch's "Lost Highway" (1997), however, Ryan Gosling's debut feature, "Lost River," leaves little to the imagination.
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Take a little from David Lynch, especially in the noirish club scenes that might have been ripped right out of Mulholland Drive; borrow some of Refn's flair for graphic violence and formless narrative structure; but where is Gosling in all of this?
Desperate to keep her two children in the house they grew up in, she accepts when her scummy bank manager Dave (a standout Ben Mendelsohn) offers her a job in his scary cabaret club - think Mulholland Drive 's Club Silencio, with more mutilation.
Gosling is clearly a student of Mr. Mulholland Dr. He’s also influenced by Harmony Korine, Dario Argento, and his collaborator of recent years, Nicolas Winding Refn.
The stream-of-consciousness effect is somewhat frustrating — but that’s by design, as Gosling seems to be echoing David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” and Francis Coppola’s “Rumble Fish.”
A derivative mish-mash of David Lynch, Harmony Korine and The Night of the Hunter, it’s presumably a labour of love, yet it doesn’t give you any sense of a personality or imagination behind the camera.
But even the most pitiless movie monsters – Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter , Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet – have an authentic emotional foundation.
Gosling’s plight reminded me of another film widely renounced at Cannes, Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny .
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Credit the great cinematographer Benoît Debie (Spring Breakers, The Runaways, Enter the Void) in large part for the striking imagery; his work behind the camera alone makes Lost River a curiosity on a visual level.
Among Gosling’s sharpest choices was working with Belgian cinematographer Benoît Debie, who also shot “Spring Breakers” and “Enter the Void,” and the film is at its best and most alive when it goes full-weirdo, leaving behind any pretext to naturalism for a deeply saturated, color-soaked look.
It's extraordinarily pretty, for one, thanks to the work of "Enter The Void"/"Spring Breakers" photographer Benoît Debie, and some truly impressive locations.
It seems perverse to hire a cinematographer, Benoit Debie, who is known for visual richness (his credits include Enter the Void and Spring Breakers) and then ask him to strip every shot of flair and distinctiveness.
The rest of the film is a collage of gorgeously trippy visuals from Spring Breakers and Enter the Void cinematographer Benoît Debie, with little substance to back them up.