July 19, 1996 (U.S. release date)
It’s not exactly a bold statement to say that TRAINSPOTTING was a phenomenon. A low budget Scottish counterculture movie that made $72 million around the world, made stars out of most of its cast, internationally launched a director who has since won best director and best picture Oscars and is still a major player today, and has been named by the BFI as the 10th greatest British film of the 20th century. Also it’s a good movie. I hadn’t seen it since the theater 30 years ago, and it knocked me out again.
It’s the sophomore film for director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew Macdonald, and they reunited much of their team from SHALLOW GRAVE: writer John Hodge, cinematographer Brian Tufano, editor Masahiro Harakubo, production designer Kave Quinn. This time it’s based on Irvine Welsh’s 1993 debut novel, and it’s the first-person-narrated tale of twentysomething heroin addict Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor in only his fourth movie) and his rowdy social circle in Edinburgh.They have some wild times, some horrible times. Fights, deaths, pubs, soccer fields, hospitals, court rooms. They rehab, relapse, reintegrate, and most of them survive it with a bit of punk rock stubbornness and Gen-X ironic distance.
Chances are you’ve seen it, I don’t have to tell you who these characters are. If not, you’ll meet them in the movie. I like the lovable idiot Spud (Ewen Bremner, JUDGE DREDD, who had played Renton in a stage adaptation), even though I really can’t fathom how he managed to accidentally splatter his shit all over his lady’s parents’ breakfast. I like seeing their square jock friend Tommy because now I recognize Kevin McKidd from starring in Rome later. Bleach blond Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller, HACKERS) is such a funny character, because it both makes sense why they’d hang out with him and why he would be so aggravating. Renton says that Sick Boy tries to kick at the same time as him just to show he can do it easily, “thereby downgrading my own struggle.”
And of course there’s Begbie (Robert Carlyle, PRIEST), the Mr. Blonde of the friend group. I love the scene where he randomly tosses a mug off a pub balcony, nails a woman in the head, goes downstairs yelling about finding the “cunt” who did it, then kicks a guy straight in the nuts, starting a bar-wide brawl. The others are not expected to help and their deadpan reactions suggest this is not unprecedented.
Carlyle and his mustache are so perfect for the older guy that’s risky to be around. Reminds me of friends’ deadbeat uncles growing up.
The whole cast was pretty new and relatively unknown (at least in the U.S.), and almost all of them blew up from this. Obviously some more than others. It’s weird to look back and realize that it was only 3 years between TRAINSPOTTING and McGregor playing Obi Wan Kenobi. Time seems slower when you’re young, and this got him so many roles that it seemed like he’d been around for a while. (It took much longer for Shirley Henderson, who plays Gail, to become the voice of Babu Frik in THE RISE OF SKYWALKER.)
Not being close to the characters in age anymore I’m more horrified by the joke that Renton picks up and sleeps with Diane (rookie Kelly Macdonald) before finding out she’s a school girl, and then she sort of blackmails him into continuing to see her. The joke of his interaction with her parents the next morning is still a good one. “Flatmates? I must remember that one.”
For me it’s one of those movies that just hits you immediately, so convincing that this is a group of people with long histories and dynamics, they have such attitude, such confidence, and the movie does too. Since I’d only seen it in ’96 I wasn’t able to see that it was on a continuum located after PULP FICTION, before LOCK, STOCK & TWO SMOKING BARRELS and FIGHT CLUB. And it makes perfect sense as a point on that line. I never made the FIGHT CLUB connection before but it’s so clear in the narration. The famous “choose life” intro is so good because it presents the world as two choices, and for many of us (especially when we’re young and full of ourselves) the conformist’s “choose life, choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a fucking big television” option doesn’t sound like us, it sounds like those other dorks. So when there’s not an obvious alternative the destructive choice doesn’t sound as crazy. At least it feels good. (Renton wants to make that clear up front because all the other junkie stuff he’s gonna show us is a nightmare. “What they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it.”)
One of the handful of things I remembered from 30 years ago was of course “the worst toilet in Scotland,” the outrageously filthy public restroom where Renton takes an explosive dump and then fishes for the opium suppositories he loses. I did not remember that this is pretty much at the beginning of the movie. It’s a brilliant stage-setter because it shows us the movie’s bawdy sense of humor, its willingness to repulse us, its sense of deadpan exaggeration, and also its subjective reality, allowing us to escape with Renton as he imagines diving into clear, peaceful water. And with all these tools it shows our narrator at a low point of human behavior – reaching into literal shit just to get the high that’s supposed to carry him over while he tries to quit – while still being charming. McGregor acts it with comic sincerity and describes it with wry humor, and then struts home drenched, proud of his victory.
I like his casual attitude toward going clean. It’s like, ‘Yeah, I do this all the time.’ He knows it’s what he should do and also that it’s probly not gonna stick. Meanwhile, we see all around him harrowing shit that proves a change of lifestyle is more urgent than he lets on – most notably (and famously) the scene where they wake up to Allison (Susan Vidler, NAKED) screaming because her baby died while they were all high. They’re in shock and they sit with it for a bit and then the only way they know to deal with it is to shoot up again.
I like how it’s kind of a crime movie without feeling like a crime movie. The drugs are so foregrounded that there’s no mistaking why they need to steal. Ironically it’s knowing Begbie, who looks down on junkies and preaches against drugs, that gets them in the deepest trouble. He’s always starting fights and also gets them involved in a major drug deal, the big score of the movie.
It was easy to fall right in love with these characters and this world. At least in the U.S. it was just so new and different to see a movie that shows Scottish people as cool, or that’s this sympathetic toward the urban poor, especially heroin addicts, without feeling preachy or exploitative or condescending. But equally important is the style – the vigor of the filmatism. It’s an intricately woven tapestry of jump cuts, freeze frames, time lapse, inserts of shots posed like portraits, playful camera moves and angles. The sort of movie that has to be mostly montages to translate the novel – literary ROCKY IV. I love the complexity of the structure, the way it opens with a footchase that we don’t come back to until 42 minutes in, and suddenly it seems important. The intercutting is god damn masterful. The way we jump from the different boys on their various hookups and then the orgasm that coincides with the soccer goal on the tape that’s being played because of the earlier scene where Renton switched it for Tommy’s sex tape. A sex scene climax, a punchline, and an important plot point all orchestrated to hit at the same moment.
It looks so colorful, always beautiful, even in the squalor. Sometimes the lighting is as stylized as SUSPIRIA. And throwing in some primary colors on the carpet or a wall or something really goes a long way.
There are so many inventive ideas like the high that’s depicted as sinking into the floor and then when he o.d.s and is taken to the hospital he continues to see his surroundings from the perspective of that dip in the floor, framed by carpet.
I’ve gone this long without really talking about music, a favorite weapon in Boyle’s arsenal. They actually had two soundtrack albums (one filled out with songs that inspired the movie or were considered for it). The movie pulsates with electronic dance music by Bedrock and Leftfield and Underworld, but also they’re using Blur and Pulp and Elastica and of course decades old Iggy Pop and Lou Reed songs. It’s that trusty cinematic trick of story and imagery and the lyrics and tone of a needledrop all amplifying each other, creating a feedback loop of emotion.
I think it’s safe to say TRAINSPOTTING is in the higher echelon of cool movies, in the sense of curating everything so perfectly – the music (both new and old), the clothes, the pacing, even the title design and the posters – that it all still seems cool three decades later, it has not dated in the way so many aggressively stylish things do. I don’t think it ever went out of style and had to come back around again. It was always there. It’s a time capsule but it’s timeless.
* * *
aftermath: Welsh has since written three sequels and a prequel, one of which was sort of the basis for the sequel film, which I’m definitely going to watch now.
P.S. Some notes on THE FRIGHTENERS (released the same day)
I also rewatched Peter Jackson’s THE FRIGHTENERS. I don’t think it needs a whole new review since I covered it pretty thoroughly in 2017’s Summer Flings series, but I wanted to mention it since it was another movie that was huge to me that summer, but not to the box office or the zeitgeist. I first saw it at the night-before employee screening at the multiplex where I worked. Our day manager, who was not anticipating the movie the way I was, was so blown away by it that he moved it into a bigger auditorium, convinced it would be a sleeper hit. Oh well.
As I discovered the last time I reviewed it, it doesn’t work as well for me now as it did in the nineties. But that’s okay. It also didn’t have anything that bothered me as much as last time. Removed of expectations I think I’ve achieved a nice, realistic balance between the masterpiece I thought it was in ’96 and the frantic mess I worried it was in ’17.
At the time the digital effects were groundbreaking, and the fact that they were being done by a beloved backyard gore movie weirdo from New Zealand was thrilling. Now, magically, their datedness is part of their charm. I love how cartoony the Grim Reaper character looks now. The morphing carpets and walls and stuff look kinda silly, but the energy of the camera moves makes them still work.
It’s still a very strange mix of tones. You’ve got this gimmicky ghost story with shades of BEETLEJUICE or some shit, but then it’s tied to a fictional mass shooting where the characters reference various real life murders. And I think Jackson got so good at faking old footage when he made FORGOTTEN SILVER that the flashbacks are possibly too authentic, too heavy for the movie.
I say arguably though because I think I lean toward the deranged choice to mix those tones being admirable, if not totally successful. It goes hand in hand with the somewhat subversive choice of having Michael J. Fox star and at first appear to be his usual character before showing that the reason he’s so haunted is because of the time he got in a big fight with his wife and caused a car accident that she died in. I mean, there’s more to it than that but I think we see enough in the flashbacks to verify that he deserves to have unfunny comic relief ghosts as his only friends.
I had almost forgotten about Jeffrey Combs’ part as the freako FBI agent. Man does that performance still work. He is so funny and so weird and I guess this isn’t the first time I watched it and thought “jesus christ, this terrified kook misogynist was a prediction of the times we’re living in,” because in my last review I brought up the scene where being yelled at by a woman causes him to puke and cry, and I said “Sadly, Dammers is a character who is relevant to our times.”
None of the nitpicky questions I listed in my last review occurred to me during this viewing. I did, however, wonder why the Trini Alvarado character fell in love with Frank. I know her husband who just died was a doofus but it seems early to care deeply about a local con man murder suspect haunted by ghosts who you have known for like two days. But I get it, attraction is hard to explain or control, it could happen.
I think actually the best way to view this movie is with the knowledge that it was once planned as a TALES FROM THE CRYPT movie. Think of it as an EC Comics adaptation. Broad, cartoony, crossing enough lines that they’ll decide to create the Comics Code Authority, but nothing to take too seriously.
August 6th, 2026 at 10:36 pm
There are a few movies that I know are good, but I totally forget how good they are until I watch them. STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY is for example one of them. But TRAINSPOTTING is one of the very few movies that I know are great, but still blow me away with their total fucking amazingness whenever I watch them! Such an incredible mix of 90s MTV film making, surreal humor and dark and realistic drama. It’s an absolutely hysterical movie until the baby dies and that complete shift in tone doesn’t even ruin the movie, it only makes it better. And the opening montage is one of the best openings in movie history. So much energy and invention, dragging you instantly into the world of the movie and its style. How the actual movie pretty much seques into it without a real transition, is just brillant film making.
The soundtrack was for me a point between “My musical tastes are broadening” and “I am probably too young to get it”. Being a European 90s rave kid who really enjoyed what came out of the UK, BORN SLIPPY.NUXX* was of course a huge defining track for me, even though most of my friends thought it was dumb (It peaked at #13 in the German single charts though). The two Iggy Pop songs were great, Sleeper’s cover of Blondie’s Atomic was also a favourite (Although I didn’t know back then that it was a cover), but I feel the rest of it left me a bit cold. Especially after every music critic hyped the album up as the greatest thing since I don’t know what. With age I learned to appreciate the rest more of course. Looking back at it, it embodies to me the “anything goes” spirit of the 90s quite well. Weird, experimental, but super cool music, Alternative music that sounds still mainstream enough for the radios, songs that our parents listened to but are still cool.
And of course I talked about my obsession with THE FRIGHTENERS in the last review thread. It’s too bad that Peter Jackson never used his power for a full restoration, that gives us the movie the way it was supposed to be before the shortened post production. Meaning: with complete FX shots and plot points that weren’t even restored in the director’s cut that we got 20 years ago, like when we find out that The Judge isn’t dead like the other ghosts, but really just cut in half and at the end rides into the sunset on the ghost dog, who is also only seen in one scene.
*Completely random, but it’s weird how this track seems to always have a different runtime. There is of course the Radio Version, which always runs the same. The long version runs on the single 11:33 minutes, on the TRAINSPOTTING soundtrack 9:43, on Underworld’s 1992-2002 Best Of 7:43, on one random compilation that I have it’s 5:11, etc. What’s up with that?