John Niven adapts his own savagely satirical novel about the Britpop-era music industry and the monsters that dwell there into a grubby and gruellingly mean-spirited feature film.
Nicholas Hoult has a certain shark-like charisma as Steven Stelfox, the indie-pop Patrick Bateman at the centre of this tale of murderous ambition. Stelfox’s appetite for success is only matched by his appetite for debauchery – and in this, he is matched by pretty much every other character in the movie. All available surfaces are constantly coated with cocaine and prostitutes. This is not a film for anyone who requires their female characters to be more than the pneumatically inflated punchline to a lad gag.
But the problem here is that while a reprehensible antihero is not necessarily an issue, an entire cast of equally repugnant characters is draining. It feels like taking a bath in anthrax. And, for all its smart-arse cynicism, the film is low on actual insights into the industry it is trying to skewer.
