Based on the Irvine Welsh novel of the same name, and typical of its author’s material, Filth offers a cynical, corrupt world replete with sexual emasculation and a seemingly endemic Scottish self-hatred. Anyone familiar with Trainspotting should recall that Scotland is not even good enough to be filled with Wankers. Instead they’re a country “colonized by Wankers.” Such sentiment is echoed in Filth, as the increasingly erratic Bruce (James McAvoy) sardonically noes that the Scottish are “such a uniquely successful race.”
With this self-hatred, egotism and corruption flourish like rafflesia, burrowing itself within the apparent existence of checks and balances, only to wait for the perfect moment to emerge and eat its bureaucracy-ridden victim from the inside out.
Bruce, a “detective, soon to be detective sergeant,” is this parasite, whose rivals for the upcoming promotion to detective sergeant, “have to be eliminated.” One by one, Bruce works his way through his colleagues, manipulating them and fooling them into madness. To be fair, the competition isn’t very steep and is comprised of the stereotypical Scott depicted as prime officer material: a junkie, a male stripper, a fascist, a dolt, and a dominatrix. Bruce himself carries issue as well. His penchant for cocaine and alcohol keep him chomping at the bit for unsolved cases, but it also exacerbates his increasingly hallucinated reality that spirals around his mysteriously absent wife and child.
Filth is shot in a familiar way. From a distance, and with the television on mute, one would be hard pressed to distinguish between Trainspotting, Filth, and last year’s Trance (directed by Trainspotting’s Danny Boyle and starring James McAvoy). This is not necessarily a knock on the film, but a way in which Filth becomes included in the growing genre of “derelict-porn,” in which the protagonist begins at the bottom of the hero scale slowly moves his way slightly above the bottom, but still well below mediocre human being.
One is begged the question as to whether or not easily corrupted institutions (the police force, the court system, the medical industry) lead to a rash of corrupted people or whether or not corrupted folks have worn down institutions to a bureaucratic standstill that prohibits the legitimate and encourages the illegitimate.
The dark humor of Filth keeps the audience enthralled with McAvoy and lessens the severity of the evil human nature that runs as an obvious rip tide through much of the film. At the same time, the extremes to which the film must go to achieve a shock value becomes trite as we wait for the overly foreshadowed reveal in the film.
