Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough
Paul Sng's documentary takes a superficial look at the Scottish novelist.
Image courtesy of Kaleidoscope Entertainment.
Good documentaries about artists should ideally seek to appeal both to those familiar with the work of the artist in question and to those who seek out the film in order to learn about a person with whom they are not really familiar. In the case of Paul Sng's film Irving Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough we have a work which may please those familiar with Welsh’s novels but which hardly stands up as an effective introduction to the man and his work. I should declare here that I have not read his books and have only seen two of the film adaptations based on them, namely Trainspotting (1996) and Filth (2013). Consequently, I was one of those looking to this film to give me an insight into Welsh’s life and into his books and was therefore disappointed in it. Indeed, my rating for this film is somewhat on the kindly side but one which recognises that fans of Welsh will probably find the film worthwhile. Being an author Welsh naturally has a way with words and the flow of his comments here is almost constant.
That said, this is a rather odd film in that it seems to place at its centre an occasion in Toronto when Welsh, now well into his sixties, takes the opportunity to experience what is described as enhanced psychedelic therapy, a process in which he is given the hallucinogenic drug known as DMT. Throughout the film we keep returning at intervals to the clinic where Welsh is under its influence but between times we have much footage that takes us elsewhere. In Edinburgh he meets old friends and recalls growing up in the city’s housing estate of Muirhouse. A visit to Miami, a favourite place of his, touches on his participation in boxing. Later in London he looks in at the Hackney Museum and comments on the time when in an age of counterculture he lived in that area. These scenes hardly seem drug induced so it becomes merely eccentric to wrap them up throughout the movie with further shots of the therapy in Toronto.
But, if the structure of the film seems rather tiresome, the real weakness here lies in the extent to which Welsh withholds any insights that contain real depth. Although he talks about his early days, he says very little about his later life. We do meet his third wife, Emma Currie Welsh, but hear nothing of her predecessors and when it comes to his novels in most cases we just get brief quotations from them heard against images made up of abstract designs and not much else about them really emerges. It seems a waste that so many distinguished readers as listed in the credits below should be called upon in this respect when their contributions are so slight. Welsh does seem to have a fondness for his novel Marabou Stork Nightmares from which he reads himself, but he dismisses the famous Trainspotting as not being his best book and yet the one for which he will be remembered. Even so, it is the film version of Trainspotting which is most strongly represented in the movie clips included here although the only special comment on these adaptations is his justified praise for the performance of James McAvoy in the 2013 film of Filth. The one admission about the characters in his novels comes when, having acknowledged that authors steal from their own lives, he indicates that the only character he has created whom he regards as being somewhat akin to himself is Mark Renton (there’s no comment at all about giving Trainspotting a prequel and no less than three sequels the latest of which, Men In Love, goes unmentioned).
Inevitably certain facts about Welsh do emerge including his pleasure in drug-taking until he got bored with it, his support for Scottish independence and his disdain for posh people generally. But we want more than superficial details and the fact that Irvine Welsh dominates the film both as an on-screen presence and as a voice-over means that Sng’s film only offers Welsh’s own take on himself. For all his success, Welsh's work can divide opinion and, although he describes his interest as a novelist in people who make wrong decisions, there are those who question the attitudes he portrays in his books and all the more so as public attitudes regarding acceptable male behaviour change. All of this leads me to feel that for a film about Irvine Welsh to have real depth we needed either an interviewer to put some challenging questions to him or contributors expressing differing attitudes to his work. This film as it stands too readily gives him a platform to be self-indulgent and for all the stress on the DMT therapy that experience leads only to confirming his belief that we are all part of cosmic energy, whatever that really means.
As will be apparent from the above, Irvine Welsh: Reality Is Not Enough was not to my personal taste and I do feel that its nature and construction make it a work of limited appeal. Nevertheless, it only seems fair to acknowledge that Welsh’s devotees may well relish spending this time in his company: Sng gives him the stage here and he knows how to hold it even if everything stays on the surface and the chance to go deeper is not taken.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Irvine Welsh, Emma Currie Welsh, Trevor Engelson, Chad Charles, Colin Campbell, Dougie Webster, Debbie Donavan, Dean Cavanagh, Michael Anthony, Darren Emerson and the voices of Liam Neeson, Maxine Peake, Ruth Negga, Stephen Graham, Helen Behan, Mark Hannah, Olivia Caw, Michael Pedersen and Nick Cave.
Dir Paul Sng, Pro Paul Sng, Screenplay Paul Sng, Ph Robbie Jones, Jordan Lynn, Jamie Quantrill and Spike Wright, Ed Angela Slaven, Music Donna McKevitt, Animation Kristin Atwood.
L S Productions/Velvet Joy Productions/Screen Scotland-Kaleidoscope Entertainment.
90 mins. UK. 2025. UK Rel: 26 September 2025. Cert. 18.
