A Clockwork Orange

Malcolm McDowell stars in Kubrick’s chilling, thrilling and unsettling cinematic vision of nihilistic violence and social control.

Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ decline-of-civilisation novel remains a chilling, thrilling and unsettling cinematic vision of nihilistic violence and social control. It was so controversial upon its release that it was withdrawn by Kubrick himself, and not seen again in the UK until after his death in 1999. Set in a flamboyantly stylised near-future where gangs of disenfranchised teenagers indulge in narcotic cocktails and revel in acts of ‘ultraviolence’, the film centres on Alex (McDowell) and his band of droogs.

With A Clockwork Orange Kubrick was striving to deconstruct classic Hollywood narratives and create a cinema that behaved like music – in doing so he created a new, viscerally disturbing mode of storytelling.