Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis are Mickey and Mallory, young lovers from traumatised childhoods who embark on a horrific killing spree across America. Mythologised and glorified by a rabid American media, their pernicious influence on the world somehow gets even worse when they are incarcerated, and Mickey sits down for a live television interview…
Based on a script by Quentin Tarantino, Natural Born Killers is an utterly loopy condemnation of the American media’s glorification of violence. Thin on thematic ideas but pushing every formal boundary imaginable, the result is one of the 1990’s cinematic landmarks, a film of stylistic extremes so amped up that even the infamous director Oliver Stone would never attempt anything like it again.
Somehow bankrolled by a major studio, it’s also difficult to overstate just how controversial Natural Born Killers was upon release, with the film becoming embroiled in high profile debates and court cases centred on copycat violence. It remains a startling artefact of its time, and as wildly provocative boundary pushing and unique piece of filmmaking as it was in 1994.