Is Nil by Mouth the bleak­est kitchen-sink dra­ma ever made?

Few gen­res are more recog­nis­ably British than the kitchen-sink dra­ma. Since She­lagh Delaney’s play ​‘A Taste of Hon­ey’ was adapt­ed in 1961, the genre has become a main­stay of cin­e­ma and tele­vi­sion in the UK. Typ­i­cal­ly com­pris­ing the impov­er­ished res­i­dents of coun­cil estates and half-for­got­ten towns, with Delaney’s Sal­ford famous­ly becom­ing a sym­bol of post­war des­o­la­tion, the kitchen-sink dra­ma makes mis­ery its back­drop and the work­ing class its drama­tis per­son­ae.

In 1997, Gary Oldman’s direc­to­r­i­al debut, Nil by Mouth, grasped the Brit Grit genre by the scruff of its neck and shook loose any redemp­tive mes­sages it pre­vi­ous­ly held. The result is a film that offers up domes­tic abuse and drugs with shame­less ease, a film that remains hard to watch for its near com­plete absence of hope.

Fol­low­ing Ray (Ray Win­stone), his preg­nant wife Val (Kathy Burke) and their imme­di­ate and extend­ed fam­i­ly, Old­man explores a grimy, Bru­tal­ist Lon­don estate with voyeuris­tic delight as he cap­tures lives on the fringes of des­ti­tu­tion. His char­ac­ters enter­tain them­selves with games of pool in dingy work­ing men’s clubs or by shoot­ing up beneath an over­pass, their only pas­time is pass­ing the time itself.

Ray is the patri­arch of the small, close-knit fam­i­ly, but their true rock is Val’s mum, Janet (played by Oldman’s sis­ter Laila Morse). It is through her eyes that we see the destruc­tion of her hero­in-addict son, Bil­ly (Char­lie Creed-Miles), and it is through her eyes that we watch – pow­er­less to help – as Ray phys­i­cal­ly and emo­tion­al­ly abus­es Val.

A vio­lent, unsta­ble fig­ure of frag­ile machis­mo, Winstone’s per­for­mance is a sick­en­ing case study of a man con­sumed by his own inse­cu­ri­ties, some­one who amounts to no more than a string of past crim­i­nal charges all rest­ing on a wan­ing rep­u­ta­tion among local crim­i­nals. Ray finds it easy to indulge his vio­lent past, stop­ping his car at one point in the film to punch a man on the street before return­ing non­cha­lant­ly to his car. He acts on ani­mal­is­tic impulse, see­ing the world in black and white, and Oldman’s screen­play allows him this vio­lent freedom.

Noto­ri­ous­ly pro­fane, Oldman’s script con­tains the word ​‘fuck’ no less than 482 times (‘cunt’ fea­tures 82 times, a record in film his­to­ry). A film with such mal­ice and hatred in its lines has not yet found a con­tem­po­rary suc­ces­sor, nor has any­thing fol­lowed that makes swear­ing sound so ugly, so prim­i­tive. Regard­less of what is tak­en away from view­ing Nil by Mouth, no film since has drawn such acute aware­ness to your own curs­ing habits.

Oldman’s iron­ic answer to youth­ful free spir­it in Nil by Mouth is evinced through Val’s broth­er Bil­ly, the tran­sient mem­ber of Oldman’s dys­func­tion­al fam­i­ly who moves from alley to alley, stair­well to stair­well, look­ing for his next fix. He steals med­i­cine from Ray’s bath­room cab­i­net, takes mon­ey from his own moth­er who can­not bear to see him suf­fer­ing from with­draw­al, and lives his day-to-day in fits and starts.

His strange coterie of drug­gie friends, includ­ing the tat­tooed Angus (Jon Mor­ri­son) who recites Den­nis Hopper’s Apoc­a­lypse Now speech in one of the film’s stand­out scenes, is a piti­ful study of drug cul­ture endem­ic to the cap­i­tal. All of Billy’s ambi­tion and hope for a bet­ter life bub­bles per­pet­u­al­ly in the bowl of a tea­spoon, an escape he can­not afford to buy but can­not live without.

This film’s aes­thet­ic, at once nihilis­tic and unde­ni­ably British, is derived from the grit and gloom of Alan Clarke, who in films such as Road, Ele­phant and Made in Britain, offered a sim­i­lar­ly bleak look at post­war Britain, depict­ing a soci­ety where pover­ty is rife and hard­work­ing reg­u­lar folk are bare­ly able to scrape by.

Mod­ern day suc­ces­sors to Oldman’s superla­tive kitchen-sink dra­ma can be found in the form of Shane Mead­ows’ work, as well as Pad­dy Considine’s own debut fea­ture from 2011, Tyran­nosaur. Considine’s har­row­ing depic­tion of domes­tic abuse with­in the con­fines of a hous­ing estate harks back to Nil by Mouth with a gap-toothed, blood­ied smile, high­light­ing the genre’s endur­ing appeal.

Nil by Mouth is a film that doesn’t enter­tain notions of cathar­sis, redemp­tion, or escape. Its char­ac­ters are tem­po­ral­ly glued in place, strug­gling to breathe under the weight of their real­i­ty. There is no sen­sa­tion­al­ist sto­ry­telling found here, no arcs or con­clu­sions. Oldman’s lan­guage is that of the every­day, his film­mak­ing is of the ordi­nary. What we see in Nil by Mouth, as shock­ing as it is to behold, is not new nor uncom­mon in the mod­ern world. Vio­lence breeds vio­lence, and Oldman’s film shows us this hor­rif­ic repro­duc­tion with­out com­pro­mise, hes­i­ta­tion or shame.