Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast

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Honorable Mention 🏅

A spoiler-free description of the movie.

A brutal gangster recruits a retired colleague for one last job.

If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.

▶ British people cursing. Say what you want about the British. But fuck me mate — no one is more inventive with their use of expletives.

▶ Cantankerous old men. There’s something funny about petty old men and you know it.

▶ Fancy editing. Jonathan Glazer movies look different. They just do. He adds these little flourishes in the edit that other directors simply do not bother with.

What I liked about it.

Does anyone recall the film Under the Skin, released in 2013? The one where Scarlett Johansson plays an alien disguised as an attractive woman to prey on lone men in Scotland. It was an absolute marvel of a film.

What about The Zone of Interest in 2023? It was a haunting study of how the unspeakable cruelties of the Holocaust were normalized and made to feel ordinary. The imagery in this film has been with me ever since I first saw it nearly two years ago. Absolutely unforgettable.

Both of these films have one thing in common with Sexy Beast — they were brought to life by the brilliant mind of Jonathan Glazer. One of the most visually bold, distinctive directors working in film today.

Sexy Beast was his feature film debut back in 2000, following a decade-long stint directing music videos like Radiohead’s Street Spirit and commercials like the famed Guinness Surfer spot.

In his feature debut, you can see how Glazer developed and refined the toolkit he’d go on to make use of in his later films. You pay attention to this sort of thing because you’re so smart.

A Jonathan Glazer film is a distinct experience. Sexy Beast makes use of striking color saturation and visual motifs, not unlike Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge.

The camerawork is visceral, and every shot is blocked out with an unmistakable attention to detail. Even throwaway shots, like a character shaving his beard. Or exiting a vehicle. These shots become spectacle in Sexy Beast — likely to due to Glazer’s proclivity to take angles that are entirely unflattering to the characters he’s studying.

Like his other films, Sexy Beast has a buzzing score that, along with a propulsive edit, makes the work more immersive.

More than anything, Sexy Beast is a subversive take on the “get the band back together” heist genre. And, beyond Glazer’s brilliant direction, what makes this film stand out is Sir Ben Kingsley’s performance as Don.

Kingsley brings everything to this role as the sociopathic gangster who refuses to take no for an answer. He carries himself with an overconfident gait and a virtually inhuman, unflinching gaze. He speaks with a quick cadence that is at once menacing and hysterical.

Kingsley’s performance as Don serves an admirable duality as the film’s primary threat and endless source of comedic relief.

This performance makes the entire conceit of the film work flawlessly.

Enjoy the film.

A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat”.

▶ Kingsley’s Don Logan was inspired by his maternal grandmother. In his words, she “was an extremely violent and unpleasant woman. She was racist, fascist, and antisemitic. When I play great heroic Jews and great heroic dark people, I’m sticking two fingers up at her. When I played Don Logan, I was channelling her.”

▶ The film was almost too profane. The film's producer, Jeremy Thomas, recalls that the American distributors were concerned about the excessive profanity in the script. In his words: “When the American studio who bought the film [got it], the legal department said: “You cannot make this. It has something like 300 uses of the word ‘cunt’, and 400 ‘fucks’”. However, it passed censorship and became a cult classic.

One great line of dialogue from the film.