It's actually a little difficult for me to write about Four Lions, which I watched last night at the Phoenix. It seems pointless to talk about how funny it was, given that the top half of the film poster consisted of about twelve different quotes of the single word "Funny" taken from various different newspapers and reviews. The jokes, by the way, are fantastic - in true Chris Morris style, they move between the dark and uncomfortable (Omar's Lion King allegory) through the intentionally provocative ("Jews invented spark plugs to control global traffic") to the absurd ("What we gonna blow up?" "Internet.") and the banal ("Is this a gesture?", says Barry, slowly running his car into a wall).

The other problem I've got is the urge to write things like "true Chris Morris style" (see above). Everyone knows his work will not so much push boundaries as it will repeatedly kick dirt at them until people can't tell where they once were. You go in with certain expectations. The last time I was left actually shocked to the point of breathlessness was during his Blue Jam series, when two parents discuss, in bored ambivalent tones, the disappearance of their child, the police finding the body and the inconvenience of having to deal with it ("Well, it sounds like he was buggered quite a lot and then strangled." "Oh. That's a bit much.") Yet, despite that bar, Four Lions managed to do it again. It is a film that is funny up to the point that it isn't, and when it isn't funny, it is stark and shocking.

I don't think the shocking is gratuituous, however, and that is where I generally draw the line. Without those moments (and don't read this next paragraph is you don't want to know about them in advance) the whole thing would be a farce. They'd be Sean Penn in the Assassination of Richard Nixon - clueless and deluded and impotent. With them, however, it becomes much more meaningful. It becomes clear that completing the bombings becomes the important thing, regardless of the actual damage done. They are no less ineffectual for being, in some way, successful.

The hardest thing about this film, but arguably the reason it is brilliant, are the moments where you are almost forced to sympathise with the bombers, especially Omar. He has a loving and devoted wife and child, yet the idea of his death is not a source of anguish and grief for them. I found Omar's coded goodbye to her at her job, perfunctory as it was with the police standing nearby, utterly awful to watch, as it should have been. There's no given justification for what he wants to do, and even his wife jokes that he as "more fun" when he was going to be a bomber. The absence of apparent motivation stops you thinking about them as heroes, however imperfect, and forces you to see them as the fools that they are.

There has been a lot of negative attention on the film, particularly coming from families of the victims of 7/7, given the close parallels. I think there is a difference between being offended and being upset. Such a person would of course be upset by the film - it's too close to a painful personal memory. That's not the same as the film being offensive. The only people that should be offended by this film are supporters of violent radical Islam, and I am completely OK with upsetting those particular sensibilities.

For a post that began with a concern that I might find it difficult to write about the film, I seem to have found enough to say. I should point out this post has taken several hours to write, in bits, because I'm still sorting out exactly what I think about it - another good thing. But I've picked over what I remember, and can't find anything disappointing, and clearly a lot that I thought was tremendous. Comments welcome, of course.