Kritiken

As articulate as the film may be on a stylistic level — especially for a first-time filmmaker — it might be Greene's performance that finally seals the film's force. Channeling a wave of frazzled insecurity and violent confusion, Greene, in only his second screen performance, makes Peter Winter's pain communicable to the viewer, and, in doing so, confirms Clean, Shaven as a film that hurts in an authentically unforgiving way.

Lodge Kerrigan's approach is commendably sympathetic toward sufferers of mental illness, but his distressed portraiture is so devoid of human feeling that it depicts schizophrenia as alien, unapproachable, and ungraspable—whereas it should have depicted human feeling as something alien, unapproachable, and ungraspable, as of course it is to those inflicted with schizophrenia.

[Clean, Shaven] is unrepentantly unpleasant, a formal and thematic assault on institutional depictions of mental illness... It's at once viscerally off-putting and emotionally and intellectually engrossing.

It's a harrowing technique, showing how hard it can be to switch crazy off. In Greene's eyes, benign images of children and family are emotionally devastating, and a fingernail looks like a foreign object that needs to be hacked out with a dull blade.Clean, Shaven is a triumph of form and function—a movie that gets stuck in the skin like a splinter, and is just as hard to extract

It's a testament to the filmmaker's instinctive poise and restraint that Clean, Shaven is unblinking but not voyeur¬istic, poetic but not sentimental, suspenseful but not exploitative, extreme but not sensational. Kerrigan abstains from overt psychologizing, and Clean, Shaven, although perhaps the most thoroughgoing filmic exploration of schizophrenia ever made, sidesteps the debates and competing theories that have sprung up over the years.

An impressive if rather unnerving first feature by Lodge Kerrigan (1993)... Shot over a two-year period and skirting experimental filmmaking with its carefully fashioned sounds and images, this creepy picture isn't for everyone, but those looking for something different should definitely check it out.

What lifts the film out of the rut is its use of expressionistic sound design (there's little dialogue, let alone plot) and occasionally disturbing images to reveal Winter's wretched, hallucinatory perceptions of the world around him; few movie portraits of the paranoid experience have been so detailed or, for that matter, so harrowing.

Very, very difficult to watch, but worth the struggle. Reviews tended to single out one particularly gruesome scene (which is indeed an ordeal), but I felt anxious and extremely disturbed from beginning to end, and I mean that as a compliment. Peter Greene gives a towering performance as the schizophrenic protagonist, but the film's power lies in its inventive use of sound and its deliberately affectless style of composition and editing.