“So there’re no good sharks?”

When you’re dealing with a professional there’s always something off-putting about him as a person in the real world. A professional criminal is someone who’s studied everything there is to know about his particular skill to the point where you wonder where he found the time to be so good. Then you see him outside of that professional world and you see that he doesn’t have much else to do with his time but hone and exercise his skill.

So when this master of driving that is Ryan Gosling has a chance meeting with a neighbour of his and her son, Irene (Carey Mulligan) and Benecio (Kaden Leos), it not just highlights all of these “fish out of water” qualities that this driver has but also shows him what he’s missing in life.

Gosling’s “Man with No Name” style of acting is downright perfect in this film. He is the guy in the corner of the room that you never notice until he needs to be noticed. It’s even accentuated in a simple scene where he’s in a diner minding his own business and someone comes up to him and starts talking about a previous job they did together. It’s mind blowing how concentrated what a seemingly free flowing character Gosling is playing can be when he needs to be.

So what really gets the film going is when Irene’s husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), returns from prison and is being harassed by some unknown crime figure. Gosling agrees to help Standard – I love his name – do this job and be free of these people so that he and his family can be safe and happy. However, something goes wrong during this job and it ends up tangling Gosling into an LA crime problem that takes a little doing do get out of.

Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher, Bronson, Valhalla Rising) is a director who’s never been shy about violence in his films. While I’m still yet to see the Pusher films, I can say from my viewing of Bronson – a film about a man who’s incessant need for attention through violence kept him imprisoned for more than three decades – and what little I’ve seen of Valhalla Rising – a film about a mutilated warrior and his constant battle for freedom – I feel I can say without any caveats that his fascination with violence is something that is here to stay. What makes it work is that it somehow isn’t grotesque, it’s actually beautiful.

Refn finds an odd equilibrium between gore and beauty that not many filmmakers can do. It’s mostly because while the gore is there on screen the film is more focused on the emotional quality of the scene and what that act of violence means for our man with no name. The first scene where the violence finally occurs, in the hotel room, there’s a moment when the action has finally ended that we see Golsing just stand back and react to what’s just happened. He doesn’t flip out or overact but like the whole film he internalizes it all. While it doesn’t make for the most quotable cinema, it does stick with you and carry over scene to scene keeping you gripped to the story that’s playing out before your eyes.

Obviously one of the big elements of this film is the driving sequences that are placed in the film. The movie opens with Gosling in the car waiting on his employers to get the robbery done and for him to get them all free and clear of the police. The mixture of driving technique and composed smart decisions is what sets the tone for the rest of the film. So when later in the film during the “heist gone wrong” scene and we get a more exciting chase sequence with Gosling driving away from the scene of the crime and being chased by an unknown driver it becomes even grander a scene that will rival many classics.

In my eyes this is a perfect film. From it’s simple idealized characters to it’s beautiful “Shane-esque” ending that I will continue to debate what happens five minutes after the camera is turned off.

Rating: 10/10