Review: Clean, Shaven (1993)

Clean, Shaven (1993)

Clean, Shaven is not an easy film and it is likely not for everyone. It is a deeply unsettling story that tells of the life of a man suffering from schizophrenia. The film is also remarkable in that it strays far from the mold of a normal movie-going experience by presenting its story through the subjective lens of its troubled subject. Whereas a usual film follows a generally nonpartisan viewpoint - the audience possessing information not in full receipt of all of the characters - here, the audience sees the world through the mind - eyes and ears - of a man suffering from a serious mental illness.

The implementation of this is in a sensory overlord such as the man, Peter Winter, played by Peter Greene, must contend with in his everyday life. Audio is spiked, distorted and overlapped, with sources both real and imagined constantly being thrown at Peter and at the audience. The visuals similarly cannot not be fully trusted as Peter suffers ongoing hallucinations. One of the main conduits for Peter's stimuli is through radio signals, a result of Peter's paranoid beliefs, and the static radio that Peter listens to in his car is one of the main sources and metaphors for the various voices that he is imagining hearing and that are constantly tormenting him.

There is also an ongoing investigation into the murder of a young girl running through the film and, as one might guess, Peter is the detective's main suspect. Following Peter, we see and hear certain things that point to him being the culprit as the others suspect, however, as we gradually learn through the film, not everything we perceive through Peter's eyes as being real can be trusted in full. This unfolds throughout the film and again conveys to the audience the terror of not being able to depend upon the certainty of one's own mind and senses.

Clean, Shaven is a harrowing experience that effectively and unnervingly imparts onto the audience the horrors of suffering from mental illness, and, in this case, schizophrenia. Kudos must be given to writer-director, Lodge Kerrigan, for his lofty ambitions and that, for the most part, he is able to reach them, as well as to Greene (who most will recognize for his role as villain in The Mask) for his very gritty and evocative performance as Peter. The reality of Clean, Shaven's narrative is scenes throughout the film that are definitely not for the squeamish nor the easily disturbed. The film equally tells of society's oft-times prejudiced and/or predetermined views of those suffering from mental illness and, again, the message is neither an optimistic or joyful one, but one that will hopefully impart the audience with some new empathy for those suffering from or affected by another's mental illness.