Movie Review: Filth is a Tragic-Comedy about Office Politics, Mental Illness, and the Downward Spiral

Filth is the story of a Scottish police officer who slips from normality into madness. Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson is out of control when he is sober, but when drugs and alcohol are introduced to an already fragile mind, he loses his grip on reality: totally, completely, fully.

Mental illness is the elephant in the room in Western society. This film shows the descent from barely hanging on to outright unhinged. The movie is a statement piece, and perhaps we should heed its warning. 

The humor (is it Scottish humor? because I am checking my Scottish heritage card here) is repulsive at best: sex, drugs... and dance music. The writer is Scottish, we'll give him a break. If you like Blazing Saddles, then a film like Filth will not phase you.

*****

Filth

Scheming Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy), a bigoted and corrupt policeman, is in line for a promotion and will stop at nothing to get what he wants. Enlisted to solve a brutal murder and threatened by the aspirations of his colleagues, including Ray Lennox (Jamie Bell), Bruce sets about ensuring their ruin, right under the nose of unwitting Chief Inspector Toal. As he turns his colleagues against one another by stealing their wives and exposing their secrets, Bruce starts to lose himself in a web of deceit that he can no longer control. His past is slowly catching up with him, and a missing wife, a crippling drug habit and suspicious colleagues start to take their toll on his sanity. The question is: can he keep his grip on reality long enough to disentangle himself from the filth?

IMDB

*****Spoiler Time*****  

The Breakdown

Bruce Robertson, played by James McAvoy, is a cruel, unapologetic Scottish police officer who treats people as he views the need to treat himself: with disdain, disrespect, and disloyalty. Since childhood, Bruce Robertson has suffered tragedy and guilt. He has bipolar disorder, for which he takes pharmaceutical medication as well as self-medicates with drugs, sex, and alcohol. The audience comes to understand that Bruce is an unfortunate and miserable soul, as he is remorseful over the death of his brother (an accidental death he caused) from childhood, his wife with their daughter has left him for another man, and he dresses up as his wife to feel a connection to his family. He is a man without hope, looking for redemption in a promotion to Detective Inspector.

When he is demoted from Detective Sargent to Constable for having his emotional, mental breakdown in full view of his colleagues, he plans his suicide. A knock on the door happens right as he is about to commit suicide. Does Bruce Robertson die at the end by his own hand, or is he saved by the woman he wishes he was good enough for? I think we all know the answer to that question. 

R.I.P. Bruce.

This film has been rated: 7.1/10 Stars on IMDB.

*****

The Review

Bruce Robertson: The games are always, repeat always, being played. But nobody plays the games like me. Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson, soon to be Detective Inspector Bruce Robertson. You just have to be the best, and I usually am. Same rules apply.

Although the film is disheveled in places where the pacing of the film is discordant with the plot, the plot itself meanders, its ribald comedic nature and dramatic death spiral, as the audience, we must understand we are seeing the world from Bruce Robertson's point of view. And, Bruce's point of view is unraveling before our eyes. We are descending with him into insanity. 

Without an anchor of his wife and daughter, Bruce has no reason to remain stable or good or kind. Bruce has no reason to be stable, good, or kind to himself. He is crying out for help, and yet no one can see the desperate state he is in. A police department trained to see the signs of instability in the public is unprofessional and uncaring when the same characteristics present themselves in one of their own officers. 

The games people play... with other people's mental health.

Thank you, James McAvoy, cast and crew, and Irving Welsh for bringing to light the horrible necessity [reality] for so many people to shove mental illness under the rug. Yet, hiding mental illness means that the problem goes unresolved. Filth is a tragic-comedy (black comedy) that isn't about depravity, profanity, or obscenity of a rogue police officer. This film is about the indecency of our society that ignores all the warning signs of mental illness and uses its own incompetence to ignore the cries of so many who require mental/emotional help.

The tragedy of this film is one of society's failures. 

Watched free on Prime Video. 

*****

The Tally 

My review will be posted on Prime as well as IMDB. 

Prime... 4 out of 5 stars

IMDB... 9 out of 10 stars 

*****

The Writer's Workshop

Movies for Writers: Filth is an opportunity to discuss and educate about mental illness.

*****

For more Movie Reviews, check out Undawnted's Critiques and Reviews page as well as her IMDB and Amazon Prime profiles. 

Have a great and wonderful day.

 

Gaslighting and the Environmental Illness Patient Published

Today, Undawnted in conjunction with Sonoran Dawn Studios published our first book in the series: Environmental Illness. 

The booklet is: Gaslighting and the Environmental Illness Patient. 

Our synopsis:

The first book in the series sheds light on the psychology of friends, family, and the medical community at large when it comes to treating the Environmental Illness patient. 

Too often Environmental Illness patients are abandoned by the people that are supposed to care about them. Here is how and why situations like abandonment and name calling occur. 

When you understand what is happening to you, then you are able to deal with the emotional and mental impacts with a more mature perspective. 

How do you know if you have fallen victim to gaslighting?

The PDF's in this series will always be FREE because we know information needed by patients should be available to them without putting their safety or security at risk because of money issues.

Undawnted has a special page for our Environmental Illness Book Series, if you would like to see what other books are on the way.

If you like our booklets, please remember to Google+ and Facebook us as well as leave positive feedback.

Thank you!!!

Have a great and wonderful day! 

Should We Cite Creativity with Mental Illness Labels?

A friend posted an article on Facebook about Highly Creative people being ADHD.  

i am highly creative and could identify with the list of attributes creative people have: not finishing projects, procrastination as a tool,and so on. 

What irked me is that we have labeled a creative process as a Mental Illness.  ADHD has been used to place children on psychotropic drugs, dismiss people, and make creativity a problem instead of an asset. 

With my creative quirks, I have had to learn to plan and budget my time. What gets done, gets done. Play time has to wait until I am done with important chores. I am on and off blogging due to my health problems as well as daily life can sometimes interfere. 

My elderly cat has been ill so giving him medicine, probiotics, and hand feeding him has been the priority over almost everything else for the last two weeks. 

For those people on the high spectrum of the creative pendulum, if we are raised to be self aware and understand how to cope with spurts of creative energy, the lows, and daily life, then we can become a very intuitive, mature inventor of ideas, creations, and life. 

The only reason ADHD was defined was to control creative energy in the classroom and home instead of allowing that energy to positively transform life. Not everyone is created to sit and be still, watch TV, or play video games. 

Some of us are born to change the world, one idea, painting, poem, or story at a time.  

So the next time the authorities want to label something that is perfectly natural, just remember what they do NOT want labeled and call it safe. I rather know what is in my food so I can choose to avoid mad scientist tech corporation syndrome than to label a child or person simply because their process is different.

If we have become too rigid as a society to be effective unless highly creative people are medicated, then we are all in big, big trouble.

Danger, Will Robinson.

So the moral to the story is let kids be kids, within the realm of common sense. Label your food, not your children.

Isn't it our lives anyway? 

Have a great and wonderful day! 

MCS, Movie Night... Getting Out the Word

I did a write up for our community newspaper's Movie Night: Devastated Lives, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities; Real Disease without Real Solutions.

I hope people read and watch as well as pass it on. 

Thank you!!!  

Afternoon Naps and Other Forms of Healing

Even for adults studies have shown that naps in the afternoon are great for the body, mind, soul, and spirit. 

I now have to take daily naps. Two or three hours in addition to the twelve to sixteen I sleep daily makes for a short day. Chronic fatigue is a symptom of my MCS/EI/Mold illnesses.  

It's a tough pill to swallow even if I am allergic to most pharmaceuticals.  I like when I have the energy to get something done. Often, I have to budget my time and make command decisions on what can and cannot be done in a day. 

Some chores get sacrificed for others. Dishes... I hate dishes especially since my hands are dry, cracked, and bleeding most of the time. My body cannot keep oil in itself so water and soap make a bad situation even worse. Laundry is pretty simple. Vacuuming once a week. Dusting is whenever.

Since I require a lot of fresh air from open windows, dust accumulates. Welcome to the desert! So dusting is not a task I put much stock into. It gets done when it gets done. 

When my windows are not open, I must rely on my air cleaners. That is: heavy duty air cleaners. These cleaners run all day and night, windows opened or closed plus I have a MERV 12 air filter in my heatpump unit. 

It is not my lungs per se; it is my liver. The mold and mercury inside my body hiding in organs and other tissues as well as in bonded molecular components eats up my sulfur, antioxidants, and methyl groups. I must also eat protein all day in order to assist my liver in maintaining some type of control (and we haven't even covered the renal damage from black mold found in my kidneys). 

Without my liver stabilized, I am unable to breathe properly and I require oxygen supplementation. The liver does many great tasks for the body. One of which is breaking down harmful substances into non-harmful substances. When my body has to concentrate on the already high amount of toxins and biotoxins in me, my liver cannot self-regulate. So I become allergic to the air I breathe, water I drink, and food I eat. 

Scary.

For instance, a few weeks ago I had a tablespoon of buttermilk ranch and had a severe allergic reaction while I was eating a tomato. I had had ranch for months without an issue, but that night my body decided that a line had been crossed. I have no idea how or why but regular ranch dressing is okay and buttermilk ranch is not. 

Talk about frustrating. I have to wait for my body to stop reacting until I can even try a tomato again or risk a permanent allergy. Isn't chronic illness wonderful?!

Now try to explain this scenario to people who do not have these types of sudden and unclear reactions. Others try to understand but then stop because it is easier to label someone crazy, insane, or psychotic than to realize the symptoms are real and part of a larger toxic cascade happening in the body. 

I have had the experience of knowing and living with people who rather bully you, isolate you, and threaten institutionalization instead of doing the right thing. Right being: researching the issue within the community that has said medical problems, finding the best course of treatment, and following through by getting the patient to the right physician. 

Sounds simple, right? Do the right thing by another person. 

As a former caretaker of my elderly mother, I always did the right thing by the person I was taking care of. When the roles were reversed, my parental unit and siblings decided to ignore the medical issues in lieu of scare tactics. 

Because of course someone that sick cannot possibly be mentally stable. 

Truth be told: the people who neglect, abuse, and torture someone who is physically, medically, or mentally ill are not only criminals but are morally and ethically corrupt to the point beyond rehabilitation.

In order to combat the cyclical night terrors associated with being terrorized, I have discovered meditation. Guided meditations on youtube and other free websites have become routine and helpful. I am glad I found them.

Rewiring a damaged/injured brain due to lack of medical attention is essential to combating reactionary impulses in the primitive brain. Plus I have cognitive issues as well as Central Nervous System damage stemming from systematic inflammation. 

I may not be able to drive, remember much in my short term memory, or use hand-eye coordination, but I am finding new and unorthodox ways to recreate neural pathways so I may recover some of what was lost over the past five years.