Cannes 2019: Too Old to Die Young, Zombi Child

"The more perfect society gets, the more psychotic we become," someone says early in Nicolas Winding Refn's "Too Old to Die Young"—or rather, early in the fourth episode, which was screened (along with the fifth) out of competition here at Cannes. Even the world's most prestigious film festival is no longer immune to the TV-versus-movies debate, and Refn, whose "Drive" and "The Neon Demon" screened in competition (with the former taking the best-director prize), is well poised to make the case that a web series can be an auteurist medium. (The show will launch on Amazon next month.)

Though it was baffling to start with episode four, "Too Old to Die Young," which stars Miles Teller as a detective with the Los Angeles County sheriff's department who moonlights as a vigilante hit man, is weird enough that you suspect that tuning in at the beginning would be equally confounding. Like David Lynch—whose "Twin Peaks" revival, of which "Too Old to Die Young" plays like a junior-varsity version, had a screening here two years ago—Refn is so fervently devoted to his own peculiar pacing and cosmology that nothing plays like it's been designed for chaptered viewing. The only option is to go with the flow.

That Martin (Teller) is a killer for hire becomes clear almost immediately, when he shoots a man who is watching the climax of Curtis Harrington's "Night Tide." (Maybe the dead man was using Refn's online streaming service.) In the main plot of what screened, Martin, who only wants to kill only the most degenerate of marks—he refuses to shoot  a man who merely owes a debt of $8,000—takes an assignment to go Albuquerque to kill two pornographer brothers (James Urbaniak and Brad Hunt).

"Too Old to Die Young" won't change anyone's mind on whether Refn's depiction of the exploitation of women—and, here, men as well—is gratuitous. A tolerance for Refn's stylistic tics (stolid line readings, neons piercing through darkness) and metaphysical gibberish is also a requirement. (The show, which Refn wrote with comic-book artist Ed Brubaker, argues that although humans may have built civilization and split the atom, breaking "the very fabric of reality," their violent impulses from their days as hunter-gatherers never really went away.)

Martin, masquerading as a drifter on the run from a breakup, insinuates his way into a conversation with the two brothers at a nearly empty bar. The scene plays out well beyond a conventional length, and Martin's resulting shambles of a kill attempt—there's a high-speed car chase and a desert standoff that appears inspired by Erich von Stroheim's "Greed"—grows progressively more complicated and surprising. With patience, it's possible to adjust to the show's peculiar pacing and structure and get on its macho wavelength, even if you sometimes wonder if the filmmaker ought to be checked for psychosis himself.