Filth (2013)
Directed by Jon S. Baird
A bigoted junkie cop suffering from borderline personality disorder and drug addiction manipulates and hallucinates his way in a bid to secure promotion.
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17 films that influenced Filth
What critics say influenced Filth
“A Clockwork Orange” is obviously the primary homage, but traces of “American Psycho” also sneak in – the scenes of Bruce doing drugs at the nightclub with his co-workers are surprisingly parallel to Patrick Bateman’s – and there are isolated moments of paranoia and brutal vulgarity that recall David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” and even Martin Scorsese’s “ The Wolf of Wall Street.
It’s one of those rare films that presents you with a totally bankrupt character, and makes you want him to succeed in his illegal endeavors, not unlike Alex De Large in A Clockwork Orange.
The references to A Clockwork Orange seem leaden and obvious.
At times, this pig in a china shop suggests a descendant of Alex from “A Clockwork Orange,” and he is sometimes filmed as such, with distorting, wide-angle shots.
Adapted (and softened) from the 1998 Irvine Welsh novel of the same name, Filth combines the sleaze of Bad Lieutenant with the gauche giddiness of Dom Hemingway , eventually metastasizing into a desperate movie about a desperate man.
Filth is bolstered by a gonzo performance from McAvoy, who seems determined to out-Bad Lieutenant the American Bad Lieutenants; like his Yankee counterparts Harvey Keitel and Nicolas Cage, he even does a scene where he coaxes sexual favors while on duty.
A self-serving Detective Sergeant in the Lothian constabulary, Bruce makes Bad Lieutenant look like a virginal vicar as he shags, snorts and schemes his way around Edinburgh, feeding his out-of-control addictions and monstrous libido.
Close cousins to Filth are In Bruges and Werner Herzog’s re-imagining of Bad Lieutenant, both of which had moral vacuums for main characters and were similarly contented in their carefree depiction of sex, violence and hardcore drug-use.
Think of a more psychedelic version of Bad Lieutenant – one that nearly borders on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and you’ll be in the right cognitive space.
“A Clockwork Orange” is obviously the primary homage, but traces of “American Psycho” also sneak in – the scenes of Bruce doing drugs at the nightclub with his co-workers are surprisingly parallel to Patrick Bateman’s – and there are isolated moments of paranoia and brutal vulgarity that recall David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” and even Martin Scorsese’s “ The Wolf of Wall Street.
Tapping into a rich literary-cinematic lineage that includes Bad Lieutenant and American Psycho, McAvoy portrays Robertson as both charismatic charmer and unreliable narrator, occasionally breaking the fourth wall to share a sick smile with the audience.
“A Clockwork Orange” is obviously the primary homage, but traces of “American Psycho” also sneak in – the scenes of Bruce doing drugs at the nightclub with his co-workers are surprisingly parallel to Patrick Bateman’s – and there are isolated moments of paranoia and brutal vulgarity that recall David Cronenberg’s “Naked Lunch” and even Martin Scorsese’s “ The Wolf of Wall Street.
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This is the same grotesque larger-than-life world as Irvine Welsh’s hit Trainspotting but without Danny Boyle’s pounding vibe and cool soundtrack.
Writer/director Jon S. Baird based his screenplay a novel by Irvine Welsh – there’s a Trainspotting reference barely a minute into the movie – and lets the author’s sublime energy infect the production.
The brutality of Bruce’s actions, combined with the film’s jaunty, often surrealist tone, give Filth’s humor its bitter sting, as might be expected from an adaptation of an Irvine Welsh novel—this is, after all, the same author who wrote Trainspotting, where a Scottish junkie dives into a public toilet and hallucinates a dead baby on the ceiling.
All Trainspotting temptations aside (we waited to see if you recognized Welsh’s name before offering up this reference point), material like this can’t be grounded in reality.
From the bigoted, corrupt, drug-addicted cop protagonist, the verbose voiceover narration, the stylistic bombast reminiscent of Trainspotting , and the costumes (half Seventies retro suits, half Edinburgh normcore), to the silly final plot twist and supercool nihilism, this one’s sure to delight the Tarantino set.
Quentin Tarantino ’s 1994 " Pulp Fiction " gets a lot of grief for wellspringing, that is, for inspiring a container ship gross of (largely) inferior "edgy" genre pictures overstuffed with blood, guts, octane, and classic rock soundtracks.
It's flat-out bonkers, aspiring to the sort of shock hallucinatory eff- ects successfully achieved by, say, Terry Gilliam in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
Think of a more psychedelic version of Bad Lieutenant – one that nearly borders on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – and you’ll be in the right cognitive space.
Those daydreams, set in some inescapable room with Broadbent’s sinister doctor lecturing the ‘hero’ about life, could have escaped from the cutting room floor of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
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By the time we reach the denouement, in which the plot's nominal murder mystery descends into an overegged hybrid of Psycho and Dressed to Kill, the acerbic gallows humour and scathing misanthropy have become more exhausting than epiphanic.
"Filth" is based on a novel by Irvine Welsh, the Scottish author who apparently trades one-word titles with Chuck Palahniuk: OK, you take "Choke," I'll take "Filth," you take "Snuff," I'll take "Porno," etc. Welsh wrote "Trainspotting," back when he had something to say and wasn't just trying to shock for shock's sake.