Everything that's going on around here, it's gotta be for some reason.
Bowing on home video a year after its disastrous Cannes premiere -- and less than a month after the token theatrical release afforded it by U.S. distributor Warner Bros. -- Ryan Gosling's directorial debut Lost River feels like it's been deliberately dumped, tossed aside like so much detritus. The recipient of scathing reviews (Variety called it "a risible slab of Detroit gothic," and that's one of the kinder notices), Lost River is the sort of film where one character will tell another, "The wolves, if they're not already at your door, they're gonna be there very fucking soon," and a minute later the soundtrack will feature the howling of a wolf. Whatever Gosling's strengths as a writer/director are, subtlety is surely not one of them.
In the 15 minutes leading up to that wolf howl, Gosling piles on the desperation for single mother Billy (his Drive co-star Christina Hendricks), who's three months behind on her mortgage payments, and her son Bones (Iain De Caestecker), who's perpetually working on his car and spends his days stripping abandoned houses of their copper piping to trade for parts. His big problem is Bully (Doctor Who's Matt Smith, wearing a glittery jacket), a local thug known for getting medieval on people's asses for encroaching on his turf, who steals a day's haul from him. Billy, meanwhile, goes to see unsympathetic bank manager Dave (Ben Mendelsohn, probably relieved to be playing someone with a normal name), who presents her with an unsavory job opportunity that could save her family from financial ruin, but at an exorbitant cost.
Also thrown into the mix are Saoirse Ronan as a girl nicknamed Rat (because of her pet rat) who lives nearby with her grandmother (played by a mute Barbara Steele), who obsessively watches home movies of her wedding day, and Eva Mendes as a woman named Cat (which may be short for Catherine, I don't know) who coordinates the talent at Dave's Big Bad Wolf Club, which puts on Grand Guignol-style performances. (The act we eventually see Billy do is inspired by Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, which the audience eats up with a spoon.) It all looks very pretty thanks to the efforts of director of photography Benoît Debie (whose other work includes Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, Enter the Void, and his most recent provocation, Love) and it comes equipped with haunting soundscapes by Johnny Jewel (who contributed two songs to the Drive soundtrack), but eventually it becomes a lot of weirdness for its own sake. A room lit by a neon flamingo? Okay. A sunken dinosaur park? I guess. A secret sex room where the worker locks herself inside a plastic shell while her client is allowed to do anything outside it? Sure, why not? What business these all have being in the same movie is another story.