Young Adam is a bleak examination of sexual compulsion, amorality and alienation, all personified in drifter Joe Taylor (Ewan McGregor), a frustrated writer who finds himself working on a barge in 1950s Scotland, alongside hard-working Les (Peter Mullan) and his frustrated wife Ella (Tilda Swinton). Les and Joe fish a body out of a river, and writer-director David Mackenzie takes his sweet time in letting us know its significance. Meanwhile, Joe starts a languid affair with Ella, and we get snippets of his past life with girlfriend Cathie (Emily Mortimer). The slow burn works well for the growing moral dilemma, and Mackenzie and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens (who also shot The Deep End, another water-based thriller with Swinton) beautifully capture the torpor, both sexual and economic, of post-war, Scottish, working-class life. The ending is too ambiguous to be satisfying, but the rest of Young Adam is just the right combination of sex and death.