For Fans of Nicolas Winding Refn

Ryan Gosling's Driver speaks fewer lines than many silent-era protagonists. Refn built the film around what the camera sees when the character says nothing: the angle of a jaw, a reflected streetlight, a scorpion on a jacket. The violence when it arrives is not an action beat. It is a rupture. The film works because of everything it withholds, and that discipline is what separates Refn's genre films from genre films that merely borrow the furniture.

Before the neon and the synth scores, Refn shot a Copenhagen drug runner in punishing handheld verité. The Pusher trilogy is unadorned in a way his later work never is, and that rawness makes it essential viewing. Frank is not a tragic hero or a cool criminal. He is a man who is bad at his job, and that banality makes the spiral feel earned. Knowing where Refn started makes where he went feel like a deliberate choice, not an affectation.

Hotline Miami arrived the same year as Drive and the two works share more than a synth palette. Both ask the player or viewer to participate in violence that is formally beautiful and morally uncomfortable. The game's roster of anonymous masked killers, its relentless electronic score, and its refusal to contextualize the carnage until the very end feel like the interactive equivalent of a Refn film. It is the only game that captures the specific mood of watching a scene through his lens.

Critics split hard on The Neon Demon, and that split is the point. Refn made a film about the fashion industry that uses the industry's logic against itself: beauty as currency, consumption as consequence, cruelty as aesthetic. It is not subtle. It is not supposed to be. As a horror film it is more interested in what the horror reveals about how we look at women than in delivering conventional dread. Polarizing is the correct response.