CINEOS Premiere
A Clockwork Orange
A gleeful young criminal is 'cured' of his violence by the state — and the film makes you wonder which is the greater horror, the boy or the treatment.
It seduces you with style — Baroque staging, synthesised Beethoven, a narrator you can't help enjoying — and then makes that enjoyment the very thing it wants you to feel guilty about. The beauty never keeps you at a distance; it clenches you, and it never opens the valve. What you carry out isn't sadness but contamination: a persistent unease about your own delight, and it does not leave for days.
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FAQ
Is it hard to watch?
The early violence is designed to implicate rather than entertain, and that is the point — the film wants you unsettled by how it was staged, and by how you responded to it.
What does the title mean?
A clockwork orange is something organic wound into a machine — a living thing made to run on command. The whole film is asking what's left of a person once you do that.