“They fuck you up, your mum and dad…” Philip Larkin’s verse pretty well sums up Ken Loach’s harrowing drama. Adapted by David Mercer from his own TV play and drawing on the then-fashionable psychological theories of RD Laing, it indicts an uncaring society for its (mis)treatment of outcasts like Janice (Sandy Ratcliff), a disturbed 19-year-old reduced to drugged zombiedom by moralistic parents and mechanistic doctors. Some of the dialogue is dated, but the anger and compassion sing through. No extras.
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