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.
Apocalyptic landscapes shoulder the weight of plot and backstory. Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later broke ground with its singular vision—blurry shots of a barren central London flash across the screen, chipped monuments caught in second-long bursts. Double-decker buses are tipped on their sides, evidence of the everyday like half-buried fossils. To repurpose the most famous London landmarks and hold them in place, capturing them in harsh glaring immobility, was a bold, exciting move. The catastrophic 28 days implied in the title plays out in the emptiness; proof of a world sealed shut.
Leigh is a less flashy filmmaker than Boyle, but his version of the city is equally cruel—a vacant, distorted version of the real thing. There is something nefarious writhing beneath the surface of Naked. As Johnny puts it to the befuddled Maggie (a woman searching for her boyfriend after a late-night fight) as they wander beneath crisscrossing train tracks: “Do you not get a sense of a whole other world beneath all this? You know, like the guts of London, what with all the tube trains and everything. The city’s viscera…” The apocalypse subgenre is about giving weight and shape to the inevitability of death, designating a space for these inescapable fears. Leigh understands that these fears congregate in a higher density in London, forcing day-to-day life to reckon with its own fragility, literally shaking the foundation of reality.
The alleyway Johnny and Maggie are caught talking in is remarkably similar to the set that Poppy (Sally Hawkins) wanders through in Leigh’s later project Happy-Go-Lucky. Poppy’s unnerving positivity, her undented passion for life, makes for a project tonally unique from Naked; if Naked is about one man’s attempt to spread hopelessness, Happy-Go-Lucky tests one woman’s desire to inspire hope. Still, on her way home from work, Poppy can’t avoid stumbling into a familiar underpass, encountering an unhoused man whose mental illness keeps him distant, unable to connect with her heartfelt imploring. All of this is proof that the city is balanced on the edge of doom, the kind that both haunts and hangs overhead, impending. Naked falls into the gap between Thatcher and Blair’s rule, narrowly predating a Labour government that entrapped the country in the Iraq War—a war that echoes on today, a war without an end. Death is a mere misstep away.
London’s class discrepancy is always the point of tension Leigh’s films coil around. It is an unshakeable injustice, poisoning the air. Even in something as innately optimistic as Happy-Go-Lucky, people’s end (enacted by cruel government policies) is, like the underground itself, running through Leigh’s filmography, shaking the ground of Leigh’s worlds. This is a city of lanes, alleyways suspended in the dark, leading nowhere, with parts of it as stark and empty as the abandoned London of Boyle’s 28 Days Later, as gray and inky blue as Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men.
Johnny is the harbinger of such ineffable catastrophe, filling every vacant crevice of Louise and Sophie’s apartment with his apocalyptic visions. The world around this ensemble is a time bomb, with every antagonistic conversation ratcheting up the tension incrementally. In the end, Naked proved that when the apocalypse comes it wouldn’t be ushered in with explosions and armies shooting bystanders amidst the jagged rubble, it will be enacted in interminable arguments, in men who turn existentialism into lawlessness, who hold people hostage with their violent thoughts and deeds. The end is here, or coming. Maybe it came long ago. Regardless, Naked argues that Johnny is its only prophet.
London-based film writer Anna McKibbin loves digging into classic film stars and movie musicals. Find her on Twitter to see what she is currently obsessed with.