Review: Shifty: Living in Britain at the End of the Twentieth Century (2025)

Watching Shifty in the middle of 2025 offers a fascinating vantage point to the film that could not have been entirely predicted. While Adam Curtis has proven prophetic before, perhaps most notably with HyperNormalisation (2016)—which explained the entire first Trump era a whole month prior to Trump winning the 2016 election—he could not have predicted that 2025 would see the United States embark on a failed reindustrialization policy (though Trump’s tariffs), a reordering of global financial capital (notably in crypto deregulation), and a military entanglement that seems more obvious as imperial posturing with each passing day (the strikes on Iran). To quote Ecclesiastes, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun,” as we see in Curtis’s five-part film, which, as the subtitle describes, explores “Living in Britain at the End of the Twentieth Century.”

A montage documentary using exclusively archival footage, like most of Curtis’s works over the past three decades, Shifty explores the changes in British society from the election of Margaret Thatcher through to the turn of the millennium. In particular, it examines how financial deregulation fuelled profound cultural changes that utterly reshaped Britain by the year 2000. While the British focus of Shifty harkens to Curtis’s early films, specifically The Living Dead (1995) and The Mayfair Set (1999), it shares a stylistic approach with his immediate predecessor: Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone (2022). Like TraumaZone, it forgoes Curtis’s voiceover narration, instead using subtitles to relay information on screen. Also, as in TraumaZone, the decision to limit his authorial nature forces us to pay special attention to the footage: and what footage it is!

Working from the mass of BBC Archives, and with some additional footage licensed through collaboration with A24, Shifty brings us into the halls of power and the personal lives of the British as they experience the seismic changes of this era. The film flows chronologically, with each part focusing on a few years, from the dawn of the Margaret Thatcher era to Tony Blair’s New Labour leading the nation into the new millennium. If there’s a main character throughout, it has to be Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady who deregulated finance in Britain in a bid to return the empire to former glory. But instead of returning Britain to great power status, Thatcher’s reforms simply started the great sell-off of the last vestiges of imperial power, with privatizations lining the pocketbooks of global financiers at the expense of ordinary British citizens.

While Curtis’s political lens indisputably hews left, don’t mistake my description for painting Shifty as a leftist screed against Thatcherism and the Tories. Curtis might believe that Thatcher was a disaster, but he has even more contempt for New Labour who, under Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown, utterly surrendered to the forces of finance unleashed by Thatcher. In fact, Curtis finds some shockingly intimate footage of Thatcher behind closed doors, where she expresses her insecurities about challengers in the party and the callous attacks of rivals and the media. One sequence is quintessential Curtis: subtitles tell us that Thatcher grew increasingly paranoid near the end of her term as prime minister and we see footage of Thatcher in a large party meeting, her eyes darting around the room as if to identify assassins, while Curtis’s iconically cold, ambient sound design plays over the soundtrack. Curtis is inventing a moment here through pure montage, but one that captures the arc of truth that he’s attempting to illuminate for the viewer.

But another sequence showcases Curtis’s delicate sensitivity as he cuts between Thatcher discussing her taste in jewelry, a party of liberal elites mocking Thatcher’s “suburbanism,” and a group of intellectuals identifying how hopelessly feminine she is. The Iron Lady who so forcefully embodied a kind of conservative elitism within the political sphere (and who seems incredibly old-fashioned from our modern vantage point) was insufficiently patrician and traditionalist for the actual British elites.

Of course, Curtis is also cutting here, ruthless, in a way absent from recent work such as Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021). The film starts with a gut punch after we get the opening titles on a black screen while Young Fathers’ “Wow” amps us up. The first footage shows notorious media personality and rapist pedophile Jimmy Savile ushering children into Margaret Thatcher’s office. Before he closes the door, the monstrous Savile shoots a little grin at the camera, as if he’s implying, “oh what fun we’re going to be having in here, but that’s not for you to see.” The ironic editorial assemblage embodies Curtis’s filmmaking project, which uses the past to illuminate the present, juxtaposing historical moments and cultural artifacts with pop music and his mordant observations in order to approximate the discordant emotional experience of living in the modern world.

Curtis’s work here in Shifty (and throughout most of his career) is extremely dense, and relies on a broad understanding of history, pop culture, art, and politics to forward its theses. But however interested in ideology and theory Curtis is, he’s not an ideological or theoretical filmmaker; rather, he uses irony and modern myth to convey complex ideas in comprehensible emotional manners. You don’t need to unpack the meaning of a moment in an Adam Curtis film since the juxtaposition of footage and narration and music will provide the exact emotion needed to make such a complexity comprehensible.

Shifty is more openly ironic than TraumaZone, however, as the subject matter is less immediately dour than examining the modern Russia that created the conditions for the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In fact, it’s downright hilarious at times. In Part One, we meet a dog that is undergoing a sex change due to a rare medical condition, a dour faced bulldog named Bruno. The Bruno sequence seemingly comes out of the blue in the midst of footage showing Thatcher’s reindustrialization program and the effects of inflation on Britain in the 1980s. But it’s precisely the absurdity of this footage of Bruno, with its droopy jowls and eyes, watching sadly as its owner discusses its case with the reporter, that makes it so brilliant. When his owner says that Bruno can undergo an operation that will make Bruno a “completely new dog,” it all clicks: this bulldog is Britain and the operation is Thatcherism. Of course, you know it won’t turn out, since you can never make an entirely new dog. That’s a fantasy that reality has a way of upsetting.

Revealing the divide between fantasy and reality, between the world the elites think they’re creating and the world as they actually make it, is the overall project of Curtis over the past several decades. So even with his voiceover absent, we still get many examinations of reality puncturing the fantasy that those in power were attempting to create. We see how the “democratization” of finance led to inflation, deindustrialization, and the real estate speculation that fuelled the eventual financial crises. We see how the glorious Falklands War actually demonstrated to the world how Britain had lost its military might. We see how the aluminum sulfate water pollution crisis in Camelford was a paternalistic coverup that allowed the government to privatize the water supply at the expense of public health. We see how the Millennium Dome attraction that was meant to embody the promise of Britain’s future instead became an ironic embodiment of the emptiness of the country and the inability of those in power to actually envision the future they wanted to make.

Curtis helps us see all of this through his riveting footage. Many of his observations are familiar from past works, particularly All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (2011) and HyperNormalisation (2016). But there are new elements here that are stunning in how they seem to chart a hinge point in history, similar to how The Power of Nightmares (2004) so expertly pinpoints the exact shift in American foreign policy that gave us the neoconservative era.

Most notable of Curtis’s new explorations is an extended look at Stephen Hawking, his failing marriage with Jane Hawking, and the evolution of his theories, which shifted from being an expansion of relativity that documents the effect of black holes to a chaotic theory of everything that seemingly divorced physics from reality. Curtis is extremely critical of Hawking, not only his treatment of Jane and her Christianity, but also his theories, which start to incorporate multiple universes as a means of explaining away the many inconsistencies and anomalies of modern physics. I’ve never before seen or heard the multiverse and imaginary time explained as expressions of the atomization of modern sociopolitical reality, but Shifty does just that. It’s startling and perceptive, framing a massive movement in theoretical physics in such a way that instantly clarifies why said movement is so profoundly unsatisfying as both science and narrative.

Curtis also finds some delightful gems of footage throughout, not only the bit with Bruno the bulldog. In the film’s closing moments, he shows an interview with David Bowie, where the late musician perceptively sums up the dangers and promises of the new age of the Internet that we were entering into at the start of the millennium. It’s a bit of an aha moment, but also something of a eulogy for figures like Bowie, who were able to identify the paradoxes and chart a course through the chaos, but who are no longer with us. In fact, for however dour Curtis’s films have been over the years, Shifty is even more distressing, even fatalistic. In the final moments, Curtis’s subtitles ask whether anyone will fight back to undo the damage of the past decades or whether we’re doomed to repeat the past by simply delving into endless nostalgia, disguising shallow artistic and political exercises as feats of resistance. He even ponders whether his own films are such exercises. It’s a statement that can only be made by a filmmaker late in his career who is completely confident in his artistic abilities and yet increasingly uneasy with the legacy he leaves behind.

In a way, Curtis’s cynicism reminds me of Hayao Miyazaki’s skepticism of his own art and legacy in The Wind Rises (2013) and The Boy and the Heron (2023). Curtis is not as seasoned a filmmaker as Miyazaki, but he seems to be entering his elder statesman years where he returns to seemingly older material (in this case, Thatcher-era Britain) in order to unearth new, provocative ways of seeing the world. By asking whether there’s a way forward, Shifty becomes a eulogy for Britain and perhaps for the entire era the island nation embodies. Yet again, Curtis proves how utterly essential he is to modern cinema and to our understanding the complexity and absurdity of our present nightmare.

9 out of 10

Shifty: Living in Britain at the End of the Twentieth Century (2025, UK)

Directed by Adam Curtis.

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