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Even the dodgiest of hardcore pornographers make some attempt at a storyline, but writer/director Michael Winterbottom is just about the down-and-dirty in 9 Songs. Kieran O'Brien and Margot Stilley star as a couple who do nothing besides go to rock concerts and have sex under fluorescent lighting, but while they bare a lot of skin, they fail to get beneath it. All that's left is the cinematic equivalent of a painful rectal examination and not just in the metaphorical sense...

Inspired by Michel Houellebecq's sexually explicit novel Platform, the action cuts between London and Antarctica, where Matt reflects on his sexually frantic relationship with Lisa. He compares walking across the icy wasteland with, "two people being in a bed - claustrophobia and agoraphobia in the same place." It's a laughably obvious stab at profundity... ah, but wait! Perhaps by weaving visceral concert footage of bands like Primal Scream and Franz Ferdinand with frenzied lovemaking, Winterbottom is connoting something about the rhythm of life?

"UGLY AND DISPASSIONATE"

Actually this film does provoke thoughts about the meaning of life - mainly because you feel it slowly slipping away in wasting 70 precious minutes trying to figure out what the heck Winterbottom was thinking with this stultifying, self-conscious, and flesh-creepingly repulsive lot of codswallop. While graphic sex works on the page, he seems oblivious to the blunting effect of putting it on screen and even underlines this with grainy video visuals and excruciating close-ups. The end result is ugly and dispassionate and for all the grunting and sweating that the actors put into it, the only feeling that comes across is one of being cheap and used. Simply put: a violation.