462. Filth (2013)

Starring: James McAvoy, Jamie Bell, Eddie Marsan

Director: Jon S. Baird

Running Time: 97 mins

Filth is a British film about a Scottish policeman, with bipolar disorder and various drug addictions, who does everything possible, no matter how brutal, to get his promotion to D.I., make up with his wife and fix his life.

This film is messed up. Not just in the drug, hallucinogenic insane way, but also because it’s just so brutal in terms of the main character, what he does, and the whole atmosphere that you get off the back of it, and yet, it’s fascinating, exciting and oddly entertaining to watch.

Just going back to the sheer brutality of this film, it’s often so much that it’s hard to watch. Firstly, the graphicness of some of the things this guy does is pretty shocking, but it’s also his unbelievably psychotic and insane mentality that really makes you grimace at what he’s doing to his rivals.

The fact that some of the stuff in this film is so shocking, explicit and brutal gives it a horribly dark atmosphere, but also makes it really exciting and unpredictable to watch all the way through.

However, this film’s not entirely about pure brutality and darkness. Another aspect of the movie that I found really fascinating was the main character. Although also very messed up, he is just such an enigma, an unpredictable person throughout, and trying to read into him, why he’s being so horrific is something that really interested me.

And of course, the comedy in this film is just excellent. The best thing about Scottish comedy is that it takes everything that I love about typical English humour, and makes it unbelievably dark.

Ok, maybe everything about this film is dark and horrible, but the comedy is really funny throughout, and despite having a totally brutal tone to it, a great deal of the jokes are just hilarious and entertaining to watch.

Overall, I’ll give this an 8.1, because it’s a fascinating, exciting and entertaining mixture of brutality, horrific human nature and purely shocking acts.