More Hockney than Cockney: In praise of Sexy Beast

From the vantage point of 2026, Sexy Beast is a classic, but at the time of its release, in 2001, it could hardly have been met with more trepidation. The late 90s was the zenith of lad culture in the UK, and the only thing that that demographic loved more than big boobs, fast cars and football was tales of gangsters. Sexy Beast arrived in the wake of a tsunami of British crime flicks; some were soulful (Face, The Limey) but most were scraping the bottom of the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Ray Winstone had turned up as a hard man in many of these hackneyed flicks, and here he was playing another gangster, albeit one with a lobster-red tan wearing canary-yellow Speedos.

In addition, the script was from Louis Mellis and David Scinto, whose compelling but nasty Gangster No 1 had been released the year prior, and the film's greenhorn director, Jonathan Glazer, had only made rock promos and adverts. People were braced for another style-over-substance gangster flick for the Loaded crowd, but what we got was the best British crime film since Mona Lisa.

Glazer’s clean aesthetic is the first breath of fresh air, more David Hockney than cockney. Sexy Beast eventually shifts to gloomy London, but for most of its runtime we’re around the sun-baked, tanning-oil-scented Costa del Sol pad of Gal Dove (Winstone), a retired footsoldier who’s soaking up the good life. Mellis and Scinto’s script is similarly inventive. If you thought Don Corleone’s “I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse” was persuasive, you hadn’t heard psychotic man-child Don Logan (Ben Kingsley)’s more straightforward “Fat cunt! Yes, Yes, Yes!” The dialogue's acidic poetry generates more violence than any shotgun blast or flick knife. It’s staccato, brutal, beautiful, like a Harold Pinter play with Tourette's. Kingsley, meanwhile, created an all-time great villain, a little weirdo who can only interact with other humans through menace.

The final kicker is the casual magic realism that Glazer confidently threads throughout, giving us glimpses of Gal’s inner demon (a huge, scary rabbit) and letting internal monologues and spoken dialogue merge dreamily. It's not too avant-garde to scare off the Guy Ritchie bros, but it confirmed that Sexy Beast belongs alongside Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance, the other great British masterwork of gangster surrealism, rather than on the gangsterland VHS heap.

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Sexy Beast screens at Cameo, 17 Aug, as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival