Young Adam

(Herald rating: * * * *)

The author of this film's source, Scottish beat novelist Alexander Trocchi, has been described by the Bloomsbury Review as "[maybe] the greatest unknown writer in the world". William S. Burroughs said of him "they don't make 'em like that any more".

But a groundbreaking 1954 novel may not make a particularly remarkable film half a century later. Young Adam belongs to a school of gloomy and downbeat Brit cinema (think Tim Roth's The War Zone, Gary Oldman's Nil By Mouth). It's superbly executed but, in its ruthless dissection of the human heart, about as much fun as watching a video of orthopaedic surgery.

The trio ensemble turn in work as good as any they've done as an odd menage on a cargo barge working the canals around Glasgow. Ella (Swinton) is the owner; her two crewmen are Les (Mullan), who is also her lover, and Joe (McGregor), a sometime writer with a shady past. The film unfolds against the background of a subplot, narrated in flashback, about a drowned woman the two men fish out of the Clyde.

The film is at times far too poetic for its own good - the grime of working-class life looks positively ravishing - and the motivation for some of the odd sexual behaviour is poorly explicated.

As a dreamy and disturbing anatomy of betrayal and guilt it feels like an on-screen novel since so much of the action is internal. But working with an almost monochrome palette of browns and greens, relieved with the odd shocking flash of red, Mackenzie has made a very accomplished film indeed.

CAST: Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Peter Mullan
DIRECTOR: David Mackenzie
RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes
RATING: R18, contains sex scenes
SCREENING: Academy (Auckland), Rialto (Hamilton), Cinema 8 (Tauranga)