Crowds at the Cannes Film Festival expressed their distaste with the most recent collaboration between actor Ryan Gosling and Director Niclolas Winding Refn by booing and whistling loudly as the credits started to roll, according to Yahoo.
"Only God Forgives" stars Gosling as an American running a boxing club in Bangkok who is seeking revenge for the murder of his brother at the behest of a domineering mother, according to The Huffington Post.
The film is the first collaboration between the indie darling and director Refn since 2011's "Drive," which received a far better reception at the French film festival and won Refn the award for best director. Gosling was not at the filming to hear all of the boos; he was still in Detroit filming his directorial debut "How to Catch a Monster," according to the Globe and Mail.
Peter Debruge of Variety slammed the bloody film and Gosling in his review.
"The wallpaper emotes more than Ryan Gosling does in 'Only God Forgives,' an exercise in supreme style and minimal substance from 'Drive' director Nicolas Winding Refn."
Jeffrey Wells, the writer behind the blog Hollywood Elsewhere, had far sharper things to say about the film.
"Movies don't really get much worse than Nicolas Winding Refn's 'Only God Forgives.' It's a s**t macho fantasy - hyperviolent, ethically repulsive, sad, nonsensical, deathly dull, snail-paced, idiotic, possibly woman-hating, visually suffocating, pretentious."
Wells would go on in that vein for quite some time with comments that became less and less printable.
According to Yahoo, some of the actors in the film were a bit squeamish about the amount of violence it contains. Kristin Scott Thomas, who plays Gosling's mother in the film, told reporters that she did the film to work with Refn but that it wasn't her type of movie.
"This kind of film is really not my thing," Scott Thomas said. "Films where this kind of violence happens I don't enjoy watching."
Refn defended the violence in the film when speaking with reporters, Yahoo reports.
"Art is an act of violence. Art is about penetration," Refn said. "Art is about speaking to our subconscious and our needs at different levels."
"Only God Forgives" will be coming to American theaters on July 19.
The trailer is not safe for work due to some profane language.
