The flavour of Brit-director Thomas Clay’s arty provocation is established early, when a schoolboy wanks over a Marquis de Sade tome. Highbrow affectations? Check. Splashily self-conscious urge to violate? Double check. But does it kick in as needed? Hell no. Clay’s debut feature caused a crap-storm in Cannes 2005, but it dawdled in distribution hell before slipping quietly through cinemas in November. Put bluntly, this Ecstasy’s impression doesn’t last.

The festival upset was caused by two sequences of sexual violence: a teenage girl is gang-raped off-screen and a woman is gang-raped on-screen, with a bottle. Clay and co-writer Joseph Lang locate these scenes among disaffected chav-teens in Newhaven, whose raping and pill-popping is counterpointed with TV footage about the war in Iraq. The key character is a promising but troubled cello-playing student who... well, let’s just say he loses it, big-time.

Is this is a Clockwork Orange-style state-of-the-nation address about media desensitisation, then? A Funny Games for Asbo Britain? In its hoodie head, perhaps. But Ecstasy comes on like yet another callow, bloke-made film in which brutalised women double as a metaphor for modern malaise. The stylishness compounds the insult, too. Clay clearly sweated over his dreamy dissolves and painterly compositions, but he gives less thought to subtext, meaning, conviction and the Grange Hill performances. Like the aforementioned bookish onanist, its most lingering impression is one of self-satisfaction.

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