Johnny is an unemployed young man in his twenties, an antihero of the 1990s. He is cold, cynical, and amoral, yet also sensitive and capable of love.
Following a violent sexual incident involving a woman in Manchester, he flees to London. The film unfolds as a series of philosophical dialogues and monologues between Johnny and the strangers he encounters during his nocturnal wanderings, through which the economic and moral decay of post-Thatcherite Britain is laid bare.
Naked is one of the peaks of Mike Leigh’s work, a direct and unsentimental look at a world in decline. Its power rests largely on David Thewlis’s raw and uncompromising performance. A fierce and, in some ways, prophetic film, it fully deserves its classic status today. Do not miss it.
