A bipolar, bigoted junkie cop manipulates and hallucinates his way through the festive season in a bid to secure promotion and win back his wife and daughter.
For all its outrageous humour and exuberant embrace of the politically incorrect, Filth is still a modern morality tale with some unexpected sentimentality lurking beneath its thick, scrofulous skin.
As a movie experience it is both gruelling and transcendent, but its best scenes can prey on your mind for days.
The odd tone – a Brit-com head with a gritty arthouse heart – won’t be for all tastes, but for the most part, Filth is savagely entertaining: a cathartic, darkly funny portrait of self-destruction.
It has its moments, but in keeping with its Christmas setting all the grotesquery just makes it seem a bit panto.
With McAvoy acting as if his life depends on it, Filth is the Irvine Welsh film we’ve been waiting years for. Tastier than a deep-fried Mars Bar…
Easily the most successful adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s work since Trainspotting, Filth is a darkly funny tale of depravation and self-destruction. The extreme approach won’t be for everyone, and the material feels slightly dated in some respects, but James McAvoy holds everything together with a tour de (police) force performance.
The film grows increasingly demented and grotesque but beneath the desire to offend lurks an old-fashioned morality tale.
James McNasty.
A bulked-up James McAvoy dominates the screen in this razor-sharp Glasgow smile of a black comedy, packed with aberrant sex, hard drugs and maximum David Soul.
If Trainspotting (1996) was a feral, fresh-seeming bacchanal of bad faith – in everything macro-Scottish or micro-British – Filth is the same rave-up held 17 years later.
Filth doesn’t have the formal inventiveness that Boyle brought to Trainspotting. What it does possess is chutzpah.
While Filth is probably still the second best film of an Irvine Welsh book, it's far closer to The Acid House and Ecstasy than it is Trainspotting.
A film this salty is always likely to leave an odd taste in the mouth.
For the first half-hour it's got a full-on horrible energy, but there isn't enough humour for it to qualify as comedy, and not enough reality or plausible characterisation to justify calling it any sort of procedural noir.
Interview: James McAvoy, Jon S Baird and Eddie Marsan talk Filth
Jon S Baird on Filth
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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