With Naked, Mike Leigh Perfected the Apocalypse Movie

British director Mike Leigh broke his own mold in 1994. While his prior films (Nuts in May, High Hopes, Life is Sweet) had offered generous, realistic spins on the real world, Naked was the cold, unpliant shape into which he poured his humanist impulses, rendering an unpleasant world only made more unpleasant by the characters he crafts. Naked’s London is a wash of sepia-toned browns and blues, purposely drained of color. The streets, shops and homes are impersonal—concrete coated in a thick layer of grime—like the city was hit by a bomb and scrambled into incomprehension.
David Thewlis’ Johnny sits at the bleeding, ugly center of the story’s tangled web, forcing everything—notably his ex-girlfriend Louise (Lesley Sharp) and her unstable flatmate Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge)—to conform around him. The world’s hopelessness initially envelopes them, like Max (Mel Gibson) in Mad Max or Theo (Clive Owen) in Children of Men, and their quest to survive is really just an unavoidable fear of death, spurring them on, keeping them frustratedly locked into life.
“Have you ever thought that you don’t know but you might already have had the happiest moment in your whole fucking life and all you’ve got to look forward to is sickness and purgatory?” Johnny asks a distracted Sophie, who sits across from him. “I just take it day to day, myself,” she responds. This is the rhythm of Johnny’s discussions: Endless, drawn-out questions that taper into confused expressions, searching for an audience rather than a conversation. Leigh’s version of the apocalypse is a place where communication is impossible and paths of conversation are frozen solid.
Part of this ineffable doom is necessitated by Margaret Thatcher’s 11-year premiership. £29 billion worth of national industries (largely the coal and railway industries) were sold under her rule, an attempt to decimate the welfare safety net, and craft a self-sustaining population. As Thatcher infamously summarized: “Who is society? There is no such thing. There are individual men and women…”
Such glaring individualism is reflective of how Naked frames each interaction. The weight of such privatization sits atop the film, splintering people across this version of London, in fittingly angry patterns. This is a selfish place, nurturing these character’s nihilism like mold growing in the dark, damp corners of a room.