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Contains very strong sexual violence
A cinematic onslaught that will leave you reeling, The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael could be A Clockwork Orange for Blair's Britain, Kubrick's meditation on state and individual violence filtered through the fractured lens of the Iraq War. Following Robert Carmichael (Dan Spencer) and other drug-addled teens in Newhaven, it builds towards a stomach-churning home invasion sequence sure to distress and/or enrage. Shot with dazzling brilliance, it's a bleak, anti-seaside postcard of the state we're in: you'll wish you weren't here.
Foregrounding Robert's transformation from cello-playing student to druggy rapist, director Thomas Clay aims to shock. The film drifts aimlessly, the release of ex-con Larry (Danny Dyer, excellent) precipitating a gang rape in a grungy flat. Cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis (Ulysses' Gaze) lenses it in a single, unbroken take that moves all around the adjoining room but never enters the bedroom where the muffled cries are coming from. The soundtrack is pumping hardcore and Tony Blair on the box, arguing for toppling Saddam Hussein.
"BECOMES EVER-MORE COMPELLING"
The spectre of the war in Iraq hangs over every frame and as the graphic, climactic act begins, the veneer of civilised behaviour shatters into brutal violence. It's near-unwatchable shock cinema - and that's both a compliment and a criticism. No other film in recent memory has so relentlessly brutalised its audience; yet its point (that we're desensitised to the real images of death and violence we sanction from our government and watch on our TVs) is at best sketchy, at worst shallow. It's a join-the-dots leap of faith that may provoke debate, but ultimately has little to add to it.
