With the out-there sensibility of a David Lynch, the mentorship of Nicolas Winding Refn and cinematography by Gaspar Noé’s DP, Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut was always likely to be a pretty unforgettable affair, either for good or ill. The film has a suitably retina-catching quad poster that you can feast your eyes on below by clicking on the image.
Set in a geographically unspecified but distinctly Detroit-like town, the film tells the trippy, weird story of Billy (Christina Hendricks) who lives with her two sons in a shabby house in a derelict suburb. Billy struggles to make ends meet, and when the bank threatens to foreclose on her, she takes a job in a weird sex-gore-and-vaudeville nightclub run by a mysterious businessman (Ben Mendelsohn).
Her eldest son Bones (Iain De Caestecker), meanwhile, has become obsessed with the city’s history; it transpires that the area was flooded to create a reservoir. There is a local superstition that the area is cursed because of that, and Bones vows to break the spell. He teams up with a young woman named Rat (Saoirse Ronan) and has trouble with the local thug, a loudmouth called, somewhat fittingly, Bully (Matt Smith).
For all those reports of critics staggering stupefied into the Croisette after it screened in Cannes, the film isn’t the only one to get booed at the festival: Cronenberg’s Crash, Marie Antoinette and Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives, another Gosling effort, all incurred the wrath of the crowds. Reserve judgment until it arrives on these shores on April 24.