Too Old To Die Young

This may sound clichéd, but this arthouse crime drama is  probably unlike anything available on any streaming service.  Personally, I was mesmerized.  But this is definitely not for most viewers.  In fact, one reviewer suggested that for anyone who’s never had a taste for director Nicolas Winding Refn’s previous work, watching it “would basically be self-inflicted torture”.

This is a 13 hour long, glacially paced, stylistic extravagance with a plot that could have easily been condensed into a couple of hours of screen time, maybe less.  Instead, it is stretched across long takes and tracking shots intending to show you every little detail that can be shown, with characters taking forever to say what they want to say.  To add to that, there are a plethora of sub-plots leading nowhere.  What’s more, the main narrative abruptly ends around the 10 hour mark or so and then shifts into something altogether surreal.

This is how one reviewer described it:

…the story begins near the middle and never actually resolves itself, and things we stew on for hours at a time ultimately don’t matter. The plot is one of revenge but the narrative is more concerned with proselytizing about where society is headed, or something. Refn is much more interested in color, texture, noise, and silence than in words or motivations or reasoning. Any meaning you take from Too Old is probably subtext, and probably not all that meaningful. But man is it fun to look at.

And lest I forget, it is also very violent.  In the words of another reviewer:

Most of these characters are killers or leaders of killers. Most of these killers kill other killers. Most of those killed killers are men. Most of those killed killer men are men who deserve to be killed. Most men, in the end, are killed. (There’s a lot of killing.)

At its most coherent, the series might be deconstructed as a kind of cathartic #MeToo revenge thriller where rapists, perverts, Nazis, and certain political leader stand-ins, are mercilessly knifed, choked, and shot in the penises. And at its least coherent it’s … well, it’s basically the same thing: rapists, nazis, knives, guns, penises, etc. There’s also a lot of talk about a coming apocalypse. And scenes involving whips — in all their uses.

The reviewer goes on to say:

Yet, for the extraordinary amount of violence, we never get to see the apocalypse, and most of the series stands still and silent. We wait.

It’s all fantastically boring and boldly fascinating in equal measure.

Here’s a link to the trailer.