Naked (Mike Leigh, 1993)

Mike Leigh's directorial pinnacle was also the making of David Thewlis, and his is a mesmerising performance as Johnny, a sorry sack of suppressed rage fleeing to London after effectively committing rape in Manchester. He uses verbal dexterity and erudition as much as a self-amusing control mechanism for his own manic depression as a weapon against all and sundry, from his former girlfriend to her flatmate and random strangers he accosts, and ends up going over the edge over several nights of sleeping rough and increasingly aimless railing. In Johnny, Leigh has created an iconic figure, an anti-hero with a crippling flaw set against each redeeming feature, and Thewlis's portrayal hits the balance between the two with an intuitive precision.
It's a far angrier film than any that Leigh has made before or since, its humour more bitter, and is also separated from the others by having so little focus for its anger, mirroring Johnny's utter lack of direction. The virulence of the class system is omnipresent, and there are other digs at the state of society which contextualise the characters' attitudes and the broken world around them, but none is presented as an overt cause of the fall. There are only glimpses of warmth: all the principals have their guard up too much to let anyone in.
There is one major false note, shoehorning in a villain, a cartoonishly misanthropic upper-class counterpart to Johnny, who seems to be included just to crudely underline that the message isn't merely that social deprivation produces dysfunctional men. Nevertheless, the rest hits with such raw force that the impact of that intrusion is negligible.

8/10