“Has nobody not told you, Brian, that you've got this kind of gleeful preoccupation with the future? I wouldn't even mind, but you don't even have a fuckin' future, I don't have a future. Nobody has a future. The party's over. Take a look around you man, it's all breaking up.”
It's 1:40 AM, and I want to scrub my skin raw.
There are no words to accurately encapsulate the feeling you get after watching this, so I'm going to settle for "deeply unsettling" and "likely to induce an existential breakdown which you will eventually forget but will never recover from". It's like a rotting corpse that crawls into your chest and keeps growing, growing, growing, no matter what you do, until your skin no longer feels like it fits around your bones. It's an absolute nightmare.
Almost all narrative films can be classified into a three act structure, even those that purposely aim to defy that. Naked doesn't necessarily break this mold, but it immerses you so thoroughly that the rules are deemed insignificant. The score adds dimension to scenes that would've otherwise held an entirely different tone, and the handheld camerawork and bleak lighting serve as subtle yet powerful reminders that this is real, and dirty, and tumor-black.
I disagree with 99% of the philosophical crap that Johnny spews over the course of this film. I think it's pseudo-intellectual and utterly meritless, and if you think it's deep or insightful, then you've read too much out of context Nietzsche. It is undeniable that he is a horrible person: he leeches off of everyone that tries to help or care about him, and he's disgustingly violent and exploitative towards every woman in the film. I have neither pity nor empathy for him. Nonetheless, he is a brilliantly written character, and no action he takes feels out of place or hard to understand. David Thelwis's performance renders him so lifelike and jarring I feel like I've been unlucky enough to meet Johnny myself.
What really sold this film to me was its women; Katrin Cartlidge's performance tore my heart into peaces. Usually, I find rape scenes in movies to be unnecessary, rendering the woman involved either a cheaply procured femme fatale who kills her rapists and therefore abolishes the entire patriarchy, or as a voiceless, battered victim, a bag of moving bones who serves as no more than a shallow plot device. The rape scenes here, however, were not smeared in Hollywood gore or shock-value, and while being deeply disturbing, were also extremely important because they addressed a very real aspect of the human experience. Without the nuance and depth given to Sophie and Louise, I might've written this off as unbearable straight-boy media. But just like everything else in this film, the women are painfully authentic, miserable, and so interesting. And just like real life, they get the brunt of the horror and a boatload of unnavigable, undeserved trauma.
Too often, dark, gritty movies feel so far-fetched that they enter the realm of dystopia, something horrifying yet not directly resemblant of our material reality. What makes this film so disturbingly captivating is that despite being made nearly 30 years ago, it's not far off from the real life of the working class today: harsh, miserable, and with no happy ending. People can barely afford a place to sleep, work is miserable, pointless, and alienating, and it seems that no matter where you run away to, it ends up being somehow worse than the place you fled; you get beat up just the same. Doom's day is at our doorstep, and while we are forced to make room for the devil in our own homes, the rich and powerful get to indulge in the most sadistic of sins and then drive away in their sleek black cars, unharmed and undisturbed.
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