The fourth of the director's Danish films before his setting up shop in America,
Bleeder is, like the
Pusher trilogy before it, set in the marginalised world of working-class and dead-end urban society, part kitchen-sink drama, part in the underworld, heavily indebted to Scorsese around
Mean Streets. Kim Bodnia, the lead from the first
Pusher film, plays an emotionally-repressed man who has just found out he's about to become a father and the central thread is his story into disintegration in the face of being unable to cope with it or express what he feels before it's too late. The violence is intense on both a physical and mental level, and it's some comfort to have Mads Mikkelsen playing support as a no-hoper obsessed with films who finally starts to come out of his shell, providing some crumb of hope.
What Winding Refn's films had back then, while already stylised to the full extent the low budget allowed, was a fundamental heart, even if it was an angry one. By Only God Forgives, the hyperstyle had utterly swamped whatever substance there was, and one has to doubt whether The Neon Demon can recapture get him back on track to making films which also mean something beyond the fantastic gloss. But looking back at his early work, you still hold out some hope.
6/10
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