Filth Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		4.0

Filth Blu-ray Movie Review

Fear and Loathing in Edinburgh

Reviewed by Michael Reuben August 12, 2014

To the ranks of twisted anti-hero lawmen—to the hall of fame that includes Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant in the film of the same name, Michael Chiklis' Vic Mackey in The Shield, Ian McShane's Al Swearingen in Deadwood and, before he got cuddly, Dennis Franz's Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue—let us add James McAvoy's Bruce Robertson, the drug-addled, megalomaniac Det. Sergeant bucking for promotion on the Edinburgh police force in writer/director Jon S. Baird's Filth. Nothing in McAvoy's previous work, whether as the young Charles Xavier in the X-Men prequels, the reluctant assassin-trainee in Wanted or the wrongly accused lover in Atonement, suggested such gusto in embracing depravity.

Depravity is familiar territory for Scottish author Irvine Welsh, who wrote the original novel of Filth, which had seemed to be unfilmable until Baird and his producing partner, Ken Marshall, approached Welsh with their concept. (Eventually there would be several dozen producers and executive producers, including Welsh and McAvoy.) Welsh wrote Trainspotting, which was memorably filmed by director Danny Boyle in a hallucinatory style that captured the highs and lows of drug addiction and featured Ewan McGregor's heroin-addled dive into "the worst toilet in Scotland". As revolting as the scene remains, Boyle also made it darkly funny and visually arresting, and Baird seemed to have a similar take on Filth, whereas other potential adapters aimed for something unrelentingly grim and gritty. With Welsh's blessing, Baird set about making the major changes required for the novel's successful transition to the screen.

McAvoy's involvement and Welsh's endorsement helped attract financing and additional talent, even though Baird himself had only one feature film to his credit, the 2008 bio-pic Cass. Released in the fall of 2013 in the U.K., Filth was a major hit in Scotland and did respectable business throughout Great Britain. In the United States, it is being distributed by Magnolia Pictures through video-on-demand, a limited theatrical release and now on Blu-ray.

In addition to its literal meaning, "filth" is also pejorative British slang for "cop". The "filth" of the title, Det. Sergeant Bruce Robinson (McAvoy), is so on top of his game that he has the entire town of Edinburgh wired, or at least that's what he tells us in voiceover as he strides through his life and work. Despite copious indulgence in drugs and alcohol and frequent sexual encounters with hookers, underaged girls and the wives of his colleagues, Bruce is certain that he's untouchable. He's also convinced that he has a lock on the upcoming promotion to Detective Inspector—but just to make sure, he plans to destroy his competition through lies, mind games and slander. So confident is Bruce in his mastery of all he surveys that he freely expresses his un-PC opinions to everyone around. These include racism, homophobia and rank misogyny, especially against his fellow officer and competition, Det. Sergeant Amanda Drummond (Imogen Poots).

For amusement, Bruce disguises his voice and makes obscene phone calls to Bunty Blades (Shirley Henderson), the wife of his best friend, Clifford Blades (Eddie Marsan), whom Bruce calls "Bladesy". Then, using his own voice, Bruce appears at Bladesy's home, all care and concern, consoling Bunty and offering to bring the perpetrator of this heinous crime to justice. Bladesy, who is Bruce's lodge brother and something of a milquetoast, is deeply grateful, while Bunty stares at her manly rescuer with smoldering eyes. Clearly it's only a matter of time before Bruce will be paying his best friend's spouse clandestine visits, just as he regularly beds Chrissie (Kate Dickie), the wife of his fellow cop Dougie Gillman (Bryan McCardie). Indeed, after taking "Bladesy" on a drug-and-booze-soaked junket to Hamburg, Bruce ensures Bunty's availability by having his friend jailed on false charges.

For light entertainment, Bruce mocks his younger partner, Ray Lennox (Jamie Bell), about the small size of his manhood—a feature that Bruce happened to observe when the two were sharing the services of a prostitute—steals balloons from little kids, and reassures his shrink, Dr. Rossi (Jim Broadbent), that everything is fine.

But everything isn't fine, although it takes a while to break through Bruce's scabrous and often irresistibly funny interior monologues, which director Baird punctuates with the kind of imaginary tableaus that you might find in sketch comedy. Bruce treats the world as a cosmic joke, but he himself is tormented by visions he can't control. Distorted animal heads suddenly appear on people's shoulders, including his own in the mirror. The recurrent image of a dead boy materializes unexpectedly; the first occurrence is when Bruce tries to revive a dying man on the street, unexpectedly winning the gratitude of the man's wife, Mary (Joanne Froggatt). Bruce hallucinates "sessions" with an elaborately theatrical version of Dr. Rossi (Broadbent in prosthetics), who knows far more about Bruce's life than anyone should.

Floating in and out of this seemingly endless dialogue between Bruce and his shadows is a very different voice, that of Bruce's saintly wife, Carole Roberston (Shauna Macdonald). She tells us what a fine husband Bruce is and how everything he does is for the sake of his family. Is she showing us a different side of Bruce, or is she simply a virtuoso of denial? The answer turns out to be a little bit of both.

In the film's opening, a young Japanese student is murdered by a group of local punks. At least in theory, Bruce and Ray Lennox are supposed to be investigating that murder, and their commanding officer, Bob Toal (John Sessions), is unhappy with their lack of progress. By the end of Filth, Bruce does manage to solve the case, but by then no one really cares about his performance as a policemen. Underneath all that bravado and bluster, Bruce Robertson turns out to be a basket case. Filth is the story of his descent (literally) and the damage he does on the way down. The triumph of the film is to make you feel it from the inside, as Bruce does, in alternate rushes of ecstatic mania and searing despair.

Filth Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Filth was shot by Matthew Jensen, a veteran of such stylish shows as Game of Thrones, Ray Donovan and True Blood. Director Baird made the conscious choice to shoot on film because he wanted what he called a "classical" look. However, the film was finished and distributed digitally, as has become standard practice, so that any scanning and color correction was already completed prior to the creation of Magnolia Home Video's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, which was presumably sourced from digital files.

The Blu-ray image is sharp and detailed with just enough of the film's grain pattern left over from the digital post-processing to confirm the non-digital origin. Although the film's framing is typically stark and simple—Baird cites Stanley Kubrick as a major influence, and there are references to Kubrick's films, both subtle and direct, throughout Filth—the colors are always unnatural and frequently surreal. The streets and interiors of Edinburgh (and, briefly, Hamburg) have sickly blue and purplish casts that accentuate the pallor in Bruce's complexion and also provide a stark contrast to sudden eruptions of bright contrasting hues, like the gold-colored sweater stretched over the belly of a pregnant woman. When Bruce imagines his colleagues and friends in parodies of their weaknesses, or when he enters his imaginary sessions with the alternate Dr. Rossi, the images fluoresce with bright, saturated colors, like either a joyous dream or a bad trip. Nearly every frame of Filth has been manipulated in some odd way, whether through contrast, brightness, color saturation or, occasionally desaturation. Bruce isn't normal, and neither is what he perceives.

As per their usual practice, Magnolia has allotted the film plenty of bandwidth, with an average bitrate of 33.35 Mbps. It's not an action film, but scenes like the imaginary encounters with Dr. Rossi are frenetic in their pace, and some of the editing is abrupt and jarring. The encoding is first-rate, with no visible errors.

Filth Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Filth's original 5.1 mix, offered on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA, plunges the viewer into Bruce Robertson's interior world, with intense whooshing sounds when snorting cocaine, abrupt changes in perspective and atmosphere (as Bruce's mind leaps from one thought to another), and jumps in time and surroundings (because Bruce suffers from what might be called "waking blackouts"). The surrounds provide a solid sense of various environments, including the plane ride that Bruce and "Bladesy" take to Hamburg and the background noise of the Edinburgh police station where Bruce works. The fine score by Cliff Mansell (Requiem for a Dream and Noah) underlines the jagged edges of Bruce's world without drawing too much attention to itself.

Special mention must be made of the dialogue. It's clearly rendered by the soundtrack, but this is a film about Scottish characters in Edinburgh, and they all have thick accents, even when played by actors (like Jamie Bell) who aren't native Scots. If your ear is unaccustomed to that particular diction, you will have to listen closely, and you may need the subtitles. Some of the slang will be unfamiliar, but you can pick it up from context.

Filth Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras appear to substantially overlap (although not duplicate) those on the Region B-locked Blu-ray released in the U.K. by Lionsgate earlier this year.

• Commentary with Director Jon S. Baird and Author Irvine Welsh: In between extensive ribbing of themselves and each other, Baird and Welsh do provide a lot of information about the making of the film. They tend to focus on the actors and their interpretation of the characters rather than on technical points. Baird also touches on the bewildering variety of countries where the film was shot, largely as a result of the multi-national financing arrangement.



• Deleted, Extended and Alternate Scenes (1080p; 1.78:1; 23:21): The scenes are not separately listed or selectable, but there are eleven of them. A number are quite good, but it's easy to see how they would have interfered with the film's pacing.



• Outtakes (1080p; 1.78:1; 7:35): This amusing compilation includes everything from muffed lines to props malfunctioning.



• On the Set: Merry Filthmas (1080p; 1.78:1; 4:15): Baird, Marshall, Welsh and various cast members discuss the sequence involving the police force Christmas party.



• James McAvoy as Bruce Robertson: The Antihero (1080p; 1.78:1; 11:58): McAvoy, Baird, Welsh, composer Cliff Mansell and others discuss the actor's portrayal of the lead character.



• AXS TV: A Look at Filth (1080p; 2.35:1; 2:57): This is a typical AXS TV promo, in which the film's trailer is expanded with interview clips, in this case from McAvoy in an interview that is not included elsewhere in the extras.



• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment: The film's trailer is not included. However, the disc includes trailers for Nymphomaniac: Volume I, The Protector 2, The Sacrament and The Double, as well as promos for the Chideo web service and AXS TV. These also play at startup, where they can be skipped with the chapter forward button.



• BD-Live: As of this writing, attempting to access BD-Live gave the message "Check back later for updates".

Filth Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Filth isn't for everyone. Irvine Welsh's humor is exceptionally dark, and Bruce Robertson is an irredeemable louse. But he's also a kind of tragic figure; McAvoy compares him to Iago or Richard III, if one of those famous villains were to be plunked down in the real world, where megalomania and manipulation so frequently get tripped up by practical obstacles. A lot of what Bruce says and does is funny precisely because it's so awful. You know you shouldn't be laughing, but you just can't help it. Highly recommended for those who don't mind uncomfortable laughter. The Blu-ray itself is excellent.