Kids in Love film review ★★★★★

Kids in Love would be the worst film of 2016 if it were a film at all. But Kids in Love is no mere film.

It’s actually a complex avant-garde experiment that redefines cinema in the 21^st Century.

We’re aware this won’t be the prevailing opinion, but sometimes you have to take a critical stand and support those savage pranksters whose sole weapon against the establishment is lacerating satire. And Kids in Love is satire. It has to be.

The story is deceptively simple: Jack (Will Poulter), a recent school-leaver, forgoes a year of travelling and a cushy internship in order to do nothing with a group of moneyed pseudo-bohemians. But the pleasure to be had from Kids in Love doesn’t come from anything so bourgeois as narrative – it is to be found in the execution of its post-Brexit, Tory-baiting, recession-era commentary. This is expertly executed by its young cast, who ruthlessly send up the kind of people they outwardly appear to be in real life.

In a brilliant bit of meta-self-mockery, Cara Delevingne plays a semi-sentient version of one of her Vogue covers. Delevingne’s real-life friend Gala Gordon gives a similarly breath-taking display of self-awareness, starring as all the Made in Chelsea cast amalgamated into a single body.

Then there’s Preston Thompson, who not only plays an ulcer-inducingly objectionable character (deliberately!) but co-wrote the screenplay with fellow actor Sebastian de Souza. Thompson and de Souza clearly read Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero and realised that, as savage and blunt as its satire was, it wasn’t quite savage or blunt enough. Surely, with Kids in Love, they have remedied this. It is utterly, utterly uncompromising in its mockery of the ruling class.

In 2016, we need such provocateurs to make things like Kids in Love, things so complexly offensive that we are forced to re-examine our own sense of taste and political awareness.

A provocative and draining experience, Kids in Love isn’t an easy watch. You leave the theatre feverish and cross-eyed, questioning everything you know. But we should be grateful for this unsparing look at life through the eyes of the clueless social elite. Thompson, Delevingne, and co. have bravely laid themselves bare for the betterment of our national conscience, and the result is brutal yet inspired. Pure art.

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Looking for more offensively bad cinema? Read our round-up of 2016's worst films

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