Lost River (2015)

Lost River marks the directorial and writing debut of Ryan Gosling and stars Christina Hendricks, Iain De Caestecker, Matt Smith and Ben Mendelsohn. This is one of the weirdest film I've ever experienced in my life. It's introduced as a Fantasy but some aspect of this film such as the setting: this fictional Detroit feels so real. This movie doesn't make any sens; for the most part it is not cohesive, the narrative structure is flawed and broken but the images, the cinematography and the score are all great and thoughts provoking.

Ryan Gosling directing in the movie was meh, and the whole time I noticed he worked on the visuals and the look of the movie which by the looks great but still I felt the focus was only on that and not the whole film, I might be wrong or not. Being an actor that many people like the easiest thing for Gosling would've been to direct a mainstream film, but I give him credit for trying to make an artistic film that will be appreciated by a select group of people.


Lost River has the potential of becoming a cult film in a few years because it is very artistic and far from being a mainstream movie due to its lack of a cohesive narrative structure and its nightmarish atmospheric approach. Ryan Gosling, who is one of my favorite actors, is the writer and director of Lost River, and for a first feature film I must say that he aimed extremely high. He borrows heavily from directors he's worked with in the past or that he's admired, so you can see some heavy influences from Refn, Noe, Cronenberg, and perhaps even more from David Lynch

The music is hypnotic and fits the surrealism atmosphere of the film but it gets annoying real fast. Although it mostly fits the movie, there's almost too much of it, the music is not really helping in the cinematic experience of Lost River.

No matter how you may feel about the movie you can't deny that it's beautifully acted. Ryan Gosling knows how to pick his cast but the one I was most surprised about, was Iain De Caestecker, whose presence and performance was electric.  Matt Smith is also having a lot of fun with his character and despite not being as menacing a villain his wacky and violent behavior is always hard to predict.

6.1/10·IMDb
31%·Rotten Tomatoes
42%·Metacritic
6/10-Verdict