The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael

In the days leading up to the Iraq War, Robert Carmichael is an introverted middle-class youth and talented cello player who is bored by his existence in the coastal town of Newhaven. He becomes associated with the unsavory teenagers Joe and Ben. Joe's cousin Larry returns to town after serving prison time for drug possession and aggravated assault. Larry immediately gets back into the drugs business and pushes the younger boys into becoming dealers; Robert soon spirals into the use of hard drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. At one point, the gang rapes a teenage girl in a squalid flat. Though Robert does not participate in the act, he takes part when the gang later attacks a middle-aged couple. ==Main cast==

• Daniel Spencer as Robert Carmichael • Lesley Manville as Sarah Carmichael • Danny Dyer as Larry Haydn • Ryan Winsley as Joe • Charles Mnene as Ben • Michael Howe as Jonathan Abbott • Miranda Wilson as Monica Abbott • Grace Kemp as concert goer == Release ==

The film premiered at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, where the film's final scene involving a brutal rape depiction caused mass walkouts. The audience response at the Edinburgh Film Festival screening was similarly negative. In a post-screening Q&A session, director Thomas Clay and co-screenwriter Joseph Lang defended the graphic violence by insisting that they wanted to evoke how rape is used as a weapon in the wars of Bosnia and Iraq. ==Reception==

Though the film's technical aspects were praised, critics opined that the film was exploitative and gratuitously violent. He concluded that the film's "combination of high arthouse ambition, uncertain acting and brutal violence left me with a nasty taste in the mouth". Leslie Felperin of Variety said the filmmakers' defense of the film as a metaphor for the brutality of war "almost persuades, particularly since the script itself makes canny reference to Elim Klimov's war-film masterpiece Come and See, which similarly aims to brutalize the viewer into enlightenment. But Ecstasy is no Come and See. Its ironies are too on the nose, at times nearly sophomoric. In the end, it plays like the work of an extremely talented but still jejune filmmaker, who on a more practical level has a long way to go yet in terms of working with thesps". ==References==