I Would Like to See It: Naked

From the first moment Johnny Fletcher (David Thewlis) opens his mouth, the reason for both his constant success in charming strangers and his homeless and hated existence are both painfully obvious. He’s just smart and insightful enough to step right through social scripts and into moments of unguarded intimacy, but once he’s inside he can’t help but use those same tools to pick and prod and jab at the parts of human nature he can understand, or at least name. His only social tool is a never-ending flood of sophistry, trivia, and petty cruelty disguised as curiosity, a sort of ratlike instinct to shred anything and everything based only on whether or not he can get his teeth into it. He sees the weak spots all around him in relationships, in belief structures, in the ways others move through life, but the only thing he knows to do with them is pick and gnaw and nibble.

Thewlis is all body in the role, long-limbed and lazily boneless, collapsing into whatever scenery he perches on, trapping and herding women with his arms and face as he pinches and gropes and grasps at them. His constant attempts to control the bodies of women — from rape to coercive hair-pulling — give his poorly thought-out nihilist outlook an edge of pitiful, frustrated vulnerability. Again and again he becomes close with women, from clingy, abused Sophie (Katrin Cartlidge) to the nameless, inexperienced young cafe waitress (Gina McKee) to whose house-sitting gig he invites himself, and then more out of boredom than anything else he inevitably pushes and needles until they finally start to scream. He has nothing else to offer, and no mechanism to pursue any other form of connection.

When Johnny finally does show a trace of human frailty during an episode of depressive psychosis, his ex-girlfriend Louise (Lesley Sharp), initially wise to his one-note schtick, immediately suggests they get back together and move home to Manchester. Of course he agrees and then robs her roommate and hightails it as soon as she’s out of sight, and in that moment it becomes clear the extent to which the film is less about Johnny, human geyser of misery, than about blindness and projection. What makes people so susceptible to his endless stomach-churning babble? Why does Louise fall for it even after an entire year of subjecting herself to his disregard and cruelty? Is the sum total of human connection just blind, undersensitized people colliding and clawing at one another in a desperate attempt to get their needs met by fundamentally incompatible beings? Naked doesn’t know, but it knows that life hurts, and that we’re all alone in it.