The Town that Drowned - Revisiting Lost River

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Some films are made to be whispered about, not explained. Some are meant to be drowned in.

Ryan Gosling’s Lost River is less a film than a haunted tableau — the half-submerged memory of a forgotten VHS found in a house that should have been condemned: frayed, half-erased, pulsing with beauty and dread.

Set in a dying town being methodically erased by a hydroelectric project, Gosling’s vision eschews realism in favour of allegorical ruin. Christina Hendricks’s Billy, a single mother, drifts into a baroque underworld of bodily spectacle and death-fetish capitalism. At the same time, her son Bones scavenges the wreckage above ground, dodging the tyrannical Bully — a leather-clad wasteland king played by Matt Smith with psychotic clarity. These two narrative channels — the mother descending, the son surviving — aren’t so much interwoven as they are running in parallel dream states, haunted by the same economic and emotional collapse.

There is, to be clear, no pretence of policy critique here. Gosling isn’t interested in the mechanisms of gentrification or the metrics of economic decay. What he is interested in is the psychic residue such forces leave behind — the way a neighbourhood dies not only in census data but in the sounds of its empty streets, the faded wallpaper, the rituals of its ghosts. His camera is tender with textures: scorched brick, muddy water, neon haze. The film borrows freely — sometimes too freely — from Nicolas Winding Refn and David Lynch, but the result feels less like imitation and more like incantation, an actor-director working through his cinematic obsessions in real time.

Ben Mendelsohn is sleazy and feline as the nightclub owner Dave, delivering the film’s most insidious performance, curling around the edges of scenes like a heat mirage. Saoirse Ronan, soft-eyed and spectral, plays Rat — a girl named for vermin, dwelling in the attic of a decomposing home with a literal pet rat and a grandmother (Barbara Steele, casting as ghost-as-symbol) trapped in an infinite loop of bridal nostalgia. These are not characters so much as archetypes etched in decay.

And that’s the contradiction that animates Lost River: a film about the erasure of place that overflows with artifice; a fable of economic ruin rendered with fashion-shoot seduction. Its psychosexual horror — most fully realised in a cabaret that stages gore as erotic catharsis — is unmistakably indebted to Refn’s gaudy sadism. Yet Gosling tempers that with Cianfrance’s affective intimacy: the sense that every ruined house was once a home, every submerged street once walked.

Its weakest link, perhaps, is Bones himself (Iain De Caestecker), who never quite coheres into anything beyond an avatar of survival. He is the most inert figure in a world that demands mythic energy, and against the baroque caricatures that populate the film — Mendelsohn’s serpent, Smith’s lunatic lord, Ronan’s silent mourner — he fades.

Still, Lost River deserves more than the polite dismissals it received on release. It is self-indulgent, yes, but also singular. It may be derivative, but it is also possessed. Gosling directs like an artist exorcising his cinematic lineage in one fever dream. And if it’s not for everyone, good. Some films are made to be whispered about, not explained. Some are meant to be drowned in.

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