For over three decades, British documentarian Adam Curtis has ferreted around the BBC archives, utilizing its resources to dissect, interpret, and otherwise obsess over a series of suspicious recurring nightmares that have dominated his career since he found his voice, quite literally, with Pandora’s Box (1992). The Oxbridge alum’s interests are manifold and intersecting, but they center around how an unremitting wave of post-war emancipation and accumulation in the 1940s was torn asunder, giving rise to uninhibited individualism, compounding mental health crises and opioid addictions, technocracy invading every field (e.g. economic institutions, political elites, digital space, arts cultures, welfare at large), and the profound inability of global elites of any ideological persuasion to conjure a vision of the future that didn’t call to the mind the past.
As mentioned, in order to understand how the time of his childhood and its stated goals have produced an age of incoherence and fragmentation, Curtis has made the BBC video reserves the coin of his work, despite being a resource first utilized in a happy accident courtesy of the need to make deadline. The archived images, which have allowed the director to represent his explorations from the early 1900s through to the present day, have long had the effect of pillow shots for the original interviews Curtis recorded to explore his concerns or the searching, meditative, oft-satirized voiceover that has served as perhaps the true hallmark of the filmmaker’s work up until Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World (2021). But then something strange happened: Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone (2022) saw the voiceover dropped in favor of scene-setting, onscreen text, and the ideas and actions inherent to the images themselves. And it’s in this pure collagist register that the documentarian’s latest, Shifty (2025), has arrived.
Yet, TraumaZone and Shifty evoke one another, beyond a shared primacy of montage. Russia 1985–1999 presents the spiraling collapse and ultimate dismantling of the USSR at the hands of Western powers, giving rise to Putin and oligarch era as a terminal point of process consequent to the prescriptive scientific rationality of the Communists and their inability to promote as an ethos or goal a coherent, real future that escaped the duality of official propaganda and its fictions and the systemic failure and terrifying emptiness that defined everyday life. In Shifty, Curtis brings this analysis home. Beginning in 1979, in the early days of Conservative Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership and ending at the turn to the 21st century under New Labour and Tony Blair, the United Kingdom becomes the subject of study as the filmmaker charts Thatcher’s effort to restore to Britain its Churchillian spirit by shuttering Britain’s industries in order to promote monetarism — and in so doing, unleashing finance capital into every sphere of society, leaving nothing but self-interest and graft among an atomized populace and a political class seeking only their own enrichment and vanity sans a language describe the present moment let alone the future. The result is another wasteland, a near-six-hour odyssey through shards of time on a moribund isle that iterate an escalating melancholy and vacuity that is most comically represented in the events surrounding the construction of the Millennium Dome and the alarming inability of the designers to adorn the “spirit level” area with anything but individual headsets and the equal parts laughable and mocking question: “how shall I live?” Construction of the dome began a month after the newly elected Labour government gave its one remaining economic power, to set interest rates, away to the Bank of England.
A sense of over-occupation and insolidity has long marked Curtis’ investigations and conclusions into his nightmares, a fact perhaps not in the least bit surprising given that since 2012 he has been recorded as regarding himself variously a libertarian, a progressive, and most recently completely unsure of his political outlook. The roving, discursive nature of his studies became almost all-encompassing in Bitter Lake (2015), Hypernormalisation (2016), and Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021) and, for anyone of a more settled ideological persuasion, fundamentally extemporaneous in their culminating non-judgments. In many respects, this appears to be due to Curtis’ near reverence for any authority possessed of a clear-eyed vision, regardless of the effects and identification of tragedy in outlooks given to illusion (perhaps explaining the treatment of Thatcher in Shifty). In seeking the concrete without a perspective, Curtis could only identify the longue durée of liberalism’s monsters without an eye to their nature.
Yet, despite these insufficiencies, TraumaZone and now Shifty mark a qualitative leap in the filmmaker’s work, a true delving into an “emotional history,” one not analyzing power, its exercise, and ethos precisely, but surveying the masses, their struggle and disenchantment from his own perspective. And it is in this way that the final moments of Shifty present what may be Curtis’ most evocative moment, as he asks, while David Bowie’s “Absolute Beginner” plays, if the work itself is not simply another exercise in nostalgia that, in one way or another, serves to placate and inoculate the viewer from being compelled to action? Curtis doesn’t know any more than his subjects or his audience might, and in this, there’s a deep and earnest solidarity. As Bowie’s song opens, “I’ve nothing much to offer / There’s nothing much to take,” and with this, Curtis appears to have found self-awareness: why give answers without a clear question or, indeed, identities capable of raising them? Instead, perhaps the only answer is to make palpable the feelings of sorrow, grief, and vacuity that define living in Britain, an island indistinguishable from Hell.
DIRECTOR: Adam Curtis; DISTRIBUTOR: BBC; STREAMING: June 14; RUNTIME: 5 hr. 46 min.
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