Greeted at last year’s Cannes Film Festival largely with a critical harrumph rather than a hurrah (we were a little more mixed on it), Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River, is finally making its way into cinemas. Though we’ve seen images and a clip already, the first trailer has now poked its head above the parapet.
Lost River, which Gosling has intended to echo the work of filmmakers like Harmony Korine and particularly David Lynch, is the trippy, weird story of Billy (Christina Hendricks) who lives with her two sons in a shabby house in a derelict part of a decaying, unnamed town. 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).
Whether audiences engage with the film’s lyrical, dreamlike style remains to be seen.** Lost River** has scored a limited and VOD release in the US on April 10 and will arrive here on April 24.