I know it feels terrible to have been wasted 13 precious hours of your life on this, but I can’t believe there are actually people defending this show. It felt just like yet another provocation from NWR. Most episodes are almost 90 minutes long, yet they have 15 minutes worth of footage. The rest is long silences, static shots with slow pullbacks, endless dollies across the landscapes as people walk around, have semi-disjointed conversations, fuck, drive, eat pie, masturbate or kill someone we don’t even know. The photography is gorgeous as usual, but as it always looks kind of the same, you get tired of it pretty fast. Sometimes shots are so dark and saturated that I couldn’t understand what was going on. There is a lot of gruesome violence, but as with the rest, habituation kicks in pretty fast.

I guess that at least up to a certain point the “plot” was alright, even though there is no narrative structure whatsoever. It’s like cinematic diarrhea: what comes out comes out, in no particular order. There are two main storylines happening simultaneously, but instead of alternating scenes from each character as most TV shows, Refn had this insane idea of dedicating full episodes to either storyline and amplify this awful sense of having been spent hours to get nowhere (remember, each episode is as long as a feature film and less content than a Youtube prank video). It gets a little better after the first couple of episodes, mainly due to the consistently hypnotic atmosphere that sucks you in, and especially that one absurd scene in each episode that wakes you up from the nihilist numbness, the most memorable ones being: 1) A random Korean dude goes to borrow money from the Japanese mafia and gets his finger chipped off with a katana by Hideo Kojima: 2) A guy’s severed hands left in the middle of the room as we listen to reggae; 3) William Baldwin making tiger noises and masturbating in his own movie theater: 4) The bad guys unable to find the right song to listen on the radio during a car chase; 5) The fascist police department performing the Passion of Christ with a broom and the Eucharist with potato chips.

By the way, even though a few characters’ arcs got inevitably closed, there is no ending and there won’t be a second season. Too bad because I was at least looking forward to seeing everyone die.