This ill-advised directing debut caused Ryan Gosling to get royally goosed in Cannes last year. Since then, it’s been trimmed by 10 minutes, but the re-edit, which seems to be of the “invisible mending” variety, hasn’t improved it much. A florid essay in hipster gothic, Lost River is set in a small town undergoing an advanced state of Detroit-like decay, and ruled by a wildly leering Matt Smith as a deranged, gold-jacketed skinhead. Meanwhile, a debt-racked single mom (Christina Hendricks) catches the eye of evil bank manager Ben Mendelsohn, who also presides over a satanic nightspot specialising in grand guignol burlesque; Hendricks winds up there performing a macabre routine with a scalpel, for which the term “nip-and-tuck” does not begin to be adequate.
Lost River is not entirely a write-off – Benoît Debie, Gaspar Noé’s regular cinematographer, musters some intense hothouse hues in tangerine and purple, and the inimitably lizard-like Mendelsohn livens things up with a silly dance and some Nick Cave-esque crooning. Clearly the work of someone convinced he’s making an instant cult classic, Lost River is an egregious vanity project, and yet oddly impersonal. 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.
