Review of Drive

The thing about this film is, I just couldn’t get it out of my head for the next two hours. Usually that’s something we equate with music not film, but in the case of Drive that is the effect it had on me. It got under my skin and infiltrated me in a way music does and it was all down to the atmosphere it created. Watching Drive is like a long summer evening after a barbeque, when your still a little tipsy and then suddenly out of nowhere a thunderstorm erupts. 

Nicolas Winding Refn’s film is so aesthetically pleasing that he really could have got away with anything in it. The music by Kavinsky and the use of the colour purple gives the film an eighties quality that is very Prince circa Red Corvette era. It’s these choices by Refn that give the opening of the film an exciting feel, as a viewer you immediately become attached to Ryan Gosling’s ‘Driver’. You don’t really understand who he is but when he meets Carey Mulligan’s ‘Irene’, you sense the beginnings of a love story and that everything will be all right. 

Refn said eloquently on BBC breakfast ‘Violence is like fucking...it’s all about the build up’. As the film progresses it emerges that this opening with it’s cool eighties soundtrack, cars and edgy protagonist has all been one massive tease, suddenly the film kicks off into a violent orgy of shootings and beatings. Yet Refn continues to titillate his audience with that soundtrack and all the things we were turned on by at the beginning of the film.  ‘Driver’s’ varsity-style jacket remains on him throughout, gradually getting more and more soaked in blood. 

What Refn does is give us something stylish and sexy to entice us and then he sabotages it right in front of our eyes. We see our hero do things we could never of imagined he was capable of. I have to admit that at this point in the film I got slightly frustrated with it, it reminded me of the Cohen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men where things just get a little confusing and dragged out. But NCFOM didn’t have the atmosphere that Drive has, so it didn’t stay with me as long. 

I turned the film off feeling a little unsatisfied, yet the mood of the film remained within me, so whether I enjoyed the film or not seems irrelevant as it certainly seemed to have had an affect on me. After hearing interviews with Refn it is clear he knew what it was he was making and so I find it hard to simply dismiss this film as violent. 

If you like Tarantino then you’ll love this film and probably not worry about the violence. For those of you who are little more squeamish or have issues with cinematic violence, I’d still say give it a go as this isn’t violence for violence sake.