Lost River movie review

The theme, the degradation of the human spirit in a decaying society, hits hard and there is very little light cheer to lift audiences out of the doldrums. Single mother Billy (Hendricks) and her two sons, pre-adolescent Franky (Landyn Stewart) and teenage Bones (De Caestecker) exist amid the crumbling houses of Lost River.

Their only neighbours are Rat (Saoirse Ronan) — so named because of her pet rat Nicky —and her mute, mentally unsound grandmother, played by Barbara Steele, in an underused cameo. Billy tries to make ends meet by working at night in a bizarre and kinky nightclub in a red-light-district. Bones, meanwhile, looking soulful and sensitive, broods throughout the production as he harvests scrap metal for a few dollars.

He is dogged in his endeavours by Bully (Smith), a bestial psycho who rules his scrap metal territory with an iron fist. He is a terrifying villain and those who are brave enough to cross him are horribly disfigured. Bones, somehow, doesn’t care and when he discovers an underwater town he goes in search of precious metal.

Director Ryan Gosling is besotted with images as well as an ear-shattering score; he shows flaming houses shot in slow motion, half-submerged streetlights in a placid lake and a close-up of a luminous woman grotesquely slicing through her face with a knife.

Cinematographer Benoît Debie truly shines here and lends an eerie, out-of-this-world experience to the film. Unfortunately, visual dexterity can only take you so far if your story falls apart. Gosling, it seems, has designed the film as a parable of American economic exploitation, peopled by a weird assemblage of characters from the sexually vulgar Dave (Ben Mendelsohn) to the animalistic Bully.

Gosling has aimed his project at the art-house crowd, but intellectually it’s bankrupt. It has no personality or identity whatsoever.