A verbal torrent emerges from the darkness of a Manchester alley, and with it, British cinema would never be the same. Johnny, the anti-hero or perhaps non-hero of "Naked" by Mike Leigh, doesn’t enter the scene: he erupts. He is a nihilistic force of nature, a black hole of caustic charisma that swallows every glimmer of hope, a prophet of nothingness armed only with a torrential eloquence and a cosmic despair. His performance, embodied by a David Thewlis who doesn't act but transmutes, is one of the most electrifying and terrifying descents into the male psyche ever captured on film. He is Dostoevsky's Underground Man catapulted into a turn-of-the-millennium London, a bard of the apocalypse who sings his serenade to the end of history amidst the rubbish and lost souls of a decaying empire.

The film, born from Leigh's celebrated method based on improvisation and the collaborative building of characters, is an infernal peregrination. After a brutally ambiguous sexual encounter forces him to flee Manchester, Johnny lands in London, at the flat of his ex, Louise. But this is not a refuge; it is merely the starting point for a long night of the soul, a picaresque odyssey through a city that Leigh and his cinematographer, Dick Pope, paint with the palette of a Francis Bacon. This is not the London of postcards, but a purgatory of damp streets, squalid interiors, and non-places illuminated by a sickly, neon light. It is a topography of the soul that perfectly reflects the post-Thatcherite malaise, the void left by the collapse of grand ideological narratives and the social fragmentation of an England that had lost its identity.

Johnny moves through this landscape like a modern Diogenes, without his barrel or lantern, but with a perpetually lit cigarette and a famished, predatory curiosity. Every encounter is a philosophical duel, a Socratic interrogation in reverse, where truth is not sought but absurdity is confirmed. From the night watchman who dreams of a different life, to the aimless punk girl, to the desperately lonely and vulnerable secretary Sophie, Johnny draws them into his orbit, seduces them with his lightning-fast intelligence, and then leaves them drained, more confused and wounded than before. His misogyny is blatant, almost pathological, but Leigh does not use it as a simple character trait; it is the most virulent symptom of his existential sickness, a hatred for the weakness and dependency he sees in others and which, deep down, he cannot bear in himself. In this, he recalls the logorrheic and misanthropic protagonists of Céline, whose verbosity is a form of spiritual vomit, an attempt to expel his disgust for the world and for himself.

Unlike Travis Bickle from "Taxi Driver," another metropolitan exterminating angel, Johnny is not a silent accumulator of rage. His violence is, first and foremost, intellectual. His tirades range from biblical numerology to conspiracy theories, from the Book of Revelation to quantum physics, weaving a paranoid cosmogony in which humanity is a failed experiment, a bar code awaiting its expiration date. He is a preacher without a faith, an intellectual without a lectern who holds his lessons in the darkest alleys. There is something Beckettian in this perpetual waiting for an end that never comes, in these dialogues that circle the drain like the characters in "Waiting for Godot," trapped in a desolate landscape that here takes the form of an indifferent metropolis.

The film’s genius lies in its refusal to provide a moral compass. Leigh forces us to spend almost two hours in the company of a man who is at times monstrous, but denies us the easy consolation of simply being able to condemn him. Through the cracks in his cynical armour, we glimpse flashes of a wounded intelligence, of a sensitivity so acute it has become unbearable. He is a Hamlet of the slums, deprived of his court and his kingdom, left with nothing but an endless monologue on the putrescence not of Denmark, but of the entire universe.

The counterpoint to Johnny is one of the most chilling figures in modern cinema: Jeremy, the sadistic yuppie landlord played by a glacial Greg Cruttwell. If Johnny is chaos, intellectual anarchy, Jeremy is systemic evil, orderly and clad in designer clothes. He shares Johnny's sharp intelligence and predatory misogyny, but his is polished by privilege, wielded from the pulpit of economic power. Jeremy has no need for apocalyptic screeds; his world works perfectly. Their confrontation is the film's black heart: two faces of the same coin of a toxic patriarchy, one desperate and the other self-satisfied. Jeremy is what Johnny could become if he were to trade his rage for comfort, his nihilism for sadism. He is the story's true demon, a Mephistopheles in loafers who enjoys the suffering of others not out of desperation, but for pure, bored amusement.

"Naked" offers no catharsis. The final scene is a masterpiece of anti-climax. Beaten and limping, Johnny has a chance to escape, a ticket to a new life offered by Louise. But faced with the possibility of a new beginning, he hesitates. And then, in a gesture that is at once one of defiance and of surrender, he steals money from a friend and hobbles away, alone again, disappearing into the city's indifferent grey. There is no redemption, no change. The cycle begins again. It is an ending that denies any Hollywood comfort and that seals the film as a merciless diagnosis, not only of an individual, but of an entire historical era suspended between the end of one century and the anxiety for the next.

Watching "Naked" is an experience that leaves bruises. It is a cinema that does not soothe but strikes, that does not reassure but brutally interrogates. It is a punch to the gut that leaves you breathless, buoyed by a script that seems to spring directly from the viscera of its characters and by a performance, from Thewlis, that transcends acting to become a form of witness. It is a foundational work, a dark monolith in the cinematic landscape of the 1990s, whose echo still resonates today, whenever a lone man speaks into the darkness, trying to make sense of the deafening noise of nothingness.