Shifty: a ‘kaleidoscopic’ portrait of late 20th-century Britain

For his last film, “Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone”, Adam Curtis “used archive footage and an increasingly abstract editing style” to portray the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Aris Roussinos on UnHerd. It showed political leaders detached from reality, a population that had lost faith in the system, and corrupt oligarchs. His latest series deploys the same techniques to tell the story of the UK from 1979 to the end of the 20th century.

The story that unfolds in “Shifty” is one of national decline, said Chris Bennion in The Daily Telegraph. Its message is that, since the election of Margaret Thatcher, “extreme money” and “hyper-individualism” have destroyed the fabric of British society and left the country “fragmented, atomised and siloed”.

Curtis relates this through a bombardment of news footage, TV clips and pop videos, relying on subtitles to shape his narrative. It jumps all over the place: a segment on Thatcher’s failed monetarist policies, for instance, also takes in clips of the production line at a crisp factory, the National Front and a “transgender dog”; all this may sometimes leave you “scratching your head”.

Curtis’s arguments can seem reductive, said Dan Einav in the Financial Times. Key moments in British history “are boiled down to cherry-picked extracts” or spun into “seemingly unrelated tangents”. But this is not a historical documentary, rather “a kaleidoscopic immersion in time and place” that captures a nation riven by contradiction. It’s also “wickedly funny” at times, and balances its pessimism “with a genuine fondness for this curious country”.