Young Adam is vile

Few movies these days are so perfectly graphic, perfectly sexual and perfectly horrid all at the same time; unfortunately Young Adam is all of these and more.

Young Adam is the story of Joe (Ewan McGregor), a writer living on a barge where he also works. In the opening scene, he and the bargeman Les (Peter Mullan) haul a floating corpse out of a canal in Scotland. It's not until a third of the way through the film that Joe and Les' relationship becomes clear, and it takes even longer for Joe's relationship with the deceased—his ex-girlfriend Cathie (Emily Mortimer), whom he accidentally killed—to weasel its way out of the choppy and unannounced flashbacks. While police are investigating Cathie's death, Joe has an affair with Les' wife Ella (Tilda Swinton), which subsequently destroys her relationship with her husband and her young child.

Rated NC-17 for some sexual content, Young Adam should be banned from all audiences. The sex scenes in this film, of which there are many, are all utterly disgusting, including one that takes place under a truck in the mud and several that constitute sexual abuse. This movie really could be used in health classes as a reason for abstinence. And it would work.

The characters also help to drag the movie down into the depths of ugliness. Not one comes close to being a decent person. Joe is a sex-obsessed, selfish freak. Les is a drunkard. Ella is insecure and harsh—not to mention she has the beady black eyes, a pinched nose and a narrow mole-like face. Cathie is just about as slimy as a victim can get while still garnering a shred of pity. The cast is filled out by a slew of loose women and unrespectable men.

Though director David Mackenzie explains in the director's statement that Young Adam as an exploration of the "moral grey area" of society, it comes across as a condemnation of humankind. Mackenzie describes Joe as a "character who is about as far from innocent as you can get, but he is also not guilty." However, there is no evidence of Joe being anything other than a ruthless pervert. Joe continually makes the morally wrong choices and only pays lip service to remorse. In the end, he is nothing more than a man successfully running away from the consequences of every sick, dirty deed he has ever done, showing no signs of repentance.

While the characters have no redeeming qualities, the movie itself is technically fairly well done. The over/under camera shots—for example showing a swan on the water and its gnarled feet beneath—are symbolically very powerful, and Mackenzie makes phenomenal use of foreshadowing. However, it takes too long to realize that the movie isn't chronological because the early flashbacks are indistinguishable from the scenes of the present progression. Character relations are also very blurry in the beginning, and the thick accents don't help to elucidate anything.

Young Adam is rated NC-17 for some explicit sexual content. It runs 99 minutes and is playing at the Bethesda Row Cinema.

Note: Silver Chips will no longer review NC-17 movies.