General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

The Last of England

The Last of England is a 1987 experimental feature film by the British director and artist Derek Jarman, a non-narrative collage of Super 8 footage, home movies, found material and staged tableaux that presents an angry, elegiac vision of Britain under Margaret Thatcher's government. It stars Tilda Swinton, Spencer Leigh, Paul Reynolds, Gerard McArthur, Matthew Hawkins, and Gay Gaynor, with Jarman himself appearing on screen.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Derek Jarman, 1987, United Kingdom and West Germany¹^•³
Running time	Classified by the BBFC at 91m 20s for cinema release; later home-entertainment versions run about 87 minutes¹
Title source	Ford Madox Brown's 1855 painting The Last of England, which depicts emigrants leaving England⁴
Production	Produced by James Mackay and Don Boyd; funded by British Screen, Channel 4 and the German broadcaster ZDF, shot on Super 8 and video and blown up to 35mm⁵^•⁶
Companion book	Jarman's journal The Last of England (Constable, 1987), reissued as Kicking the Pricks (Vintage, 1996)⁷
Certification	BBFC 15, "contains strong language and moderate sex"¹
Reception	60% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 10 reviews; 67% audience score⁸

Spoilers

Plot

The setting is London and its fringes under Margaret Thatcher: demolished terraces, waste ground, scrubland, and wire, shot on Super 8 and transferred to video so that even the medium looks like a memory decaying in the keeping⁴. The film opens with Jarman himself, uncredited, scribbling notes into a large scrapbook⁴, and the whole film keeps that scrapbook logic: fragments glued together, memories beside fantasies beside newsreel-style chronicle.

At the center is a family. A man (Nigel Terry) and a woman (Spring) drift through a marriage and a nation in simultaneous decline, with a small boy moving through the margins of the frame. Their domestic life is not dramatized in scenes of quarrel or reconciliation; it is shown in held images, faces filmed until they stop being faces and become landscapes. Tilda Swinton, in one of her earliest screen appearances, recurs as a young woman in a wedding dress, an image that at first reads as ceremony or hope.

Around the family, Jarman assembles the country. A voiceover, drawn from his own writing and intoned in part by Terry, splices together lines from T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men and Allen Ginsberg's Howl over footage of dereliction¹⁵. In one of the film's most transgressive images, two men have sex on a Union Jack, the flag itself turned into a bed for the acts the state condemns¹⁵. Elsewhere, balaclava-clad men brutalize emaciated prisoners in scenes that could be spliced into a nuclear war film like Threads without a cut¹⁶. A disco montage is cut with staccato violence: Jarman's journal records "1600 cuts in six minutes"⁴. And in a derelict interior, a figure in military garb performs a slow, ritualistic dance, a direct homage to the boyars' dance in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, the image of a state performing ceremony while everything around it rots.

The film's climax is the bride on the beach. The husband seen earlier in the film has been executed, and Swinton's bride mourns him on the shore near Jarman's home at Dungeness, Kent, a beach filmed until it seems completely alien and otherworldly¹⁷. She dances on the sand, then takes shears and her own teeth to her wedding dress, tearing it apart while the non-lyrical ululation of Diamanda Galás' "Εξελόυμε (Deliver Me)" plays, intercut with flashes of her husband's execution⁴. The dress that read as hope is revealed to have been funerary all along. In the final shot she departs the diseased land by boat, a scene that recreates the Ford Madox Brown painting of 1855 that gave the film its title, itself inspired by the emigration of the sculptor Thomas Woolner to Australia¹⁵. England's last of England is not a person but a leaving.

Characters

The narrator (Nigel Terry) delivers much of the voiceover, a furious, poetic commentary that is the film's connective tissue. He also appears as the husband at the film's center, a figure of domestic endurance in a country that offers none.

The bride (Tilda Swinton) is the film's emblem. In bleached light, in a wedding dress, she embodies what one critic called a past anger disappointed at the present¹⁷. It was one of Swinton's first screen roles, and her scream in the promotional image remains the film's most famous face.

The wife (Spring), credited simply by her first name, completes the central family, drifting through the marriage as the nation erodes around it.

The child appears only in the margins of the frame, but the film quietly establishes that the adults' fate is his inheritance.

Derek Jarman (uncredited) opens the film himself, writing in his scrapbook, making the whole work an act of personal testimony⁴.

Interpretations and controversies

The film was made in the shadow of Thatcher's Section 28 legislation barring "the promotion of homosexuality," and its transgressive imagery, particularly the sex on the Union Jack, was read as direct defiance of a government that had made Jarman's own life a political target⁴. Jarman had recently been diagnosed with HIV, and the film is haunted by AIDS as well as by politics¹⁸. Yet the despair of the film proved to be only one chapter: in the years that followed, Jarman published diaries about his illness, cultivated a garden at Dungeness, returned to painting, and became one of the earliest openly HIV-positive public figures and a leading voice for gay rights¹⁹. The boat at the end, read against that later life, looks less like surrender than like a door held open.

Form and structure

The film is built as a collage rather than a plot. Francesca Balboni, writing in the Oxford Art Journal, describes it as a "swirling mélange of family home movies, found footage, and loosely connected vignettes": hungry young men in a wasteland of rubble, refugees huddled on an industrial dock, a rave-bacchanal, a military-style execution, and a remembered marriage that dissolves into Swinton's screams of loss and longing.² A poetic voice-over and a collage of sound and music hold the fragments together.²

The Frameline festival synopsis identifies three strands: black-and-white shots of Jarman at home in London reflecting on being gay and an outsider in Britain; a home-movie scrapbook of his wartime childhood; and a series of angry staged tableaux, including Swinton tearing her wedding dress dockside in a parody of the Royal Wedding and a soldier and his lover on top of a Union Jack.³ The opening dock sequence, in which a group of people await an unknown fate under the eye of an armed man in a balaclava, is set to Marianne Faithfull's a cappella rendition of "The Skye Boat Song".⁴

Politics and context

The film responds directly to the Britain of the 1980s. Balboni writes that its vignettes respond to "the widening economic inequality and institutionalized intolerance under Margaret Thatcher's conservative government", attacking industrialization, consumerism, nuclear energy, war, imperialism, and homophobia.² The BFI describes it as a lament on the rise of Thatcherism and corporate dealings, in which London's Docklands are reimagined as a ruined wasteland where prisoners are executed in cold blood.⁹

The Docklands setting carries much of the film's meaning. Mark W. Turner, a scholar of Victorian and film studies, argues in his chapter "Derek Jarman in the Docklands" that the film is a "condition-of-England film" in which the Docklands stand for "an endpoint of industrial modernity" and "a contemporary social struggle in the context of Thatcherite neoliberalism"; the place of the Docklands in the film, he writes, is the place of Britain in the 1980s, "brutal, spent, and undergoing the radically damaging forces of neoliberal ideology".¹⁰

The film was made just after Jarman was diagnosed with HIV, and the BFI characterizes its fusion of Super 8 material, riot footage and home movies as "jagged and elegiac; an angry, powerful, Blake-like vision of England in turmoil".⁹ Jarman rejected the label of pessimism: "It's very pessimistic? You're a pessimist? Not at all. The act of making the film is the opposite. I'm not cowering in this room, I'm going down fighting…"² A Courtauld Institute essay notes that he also called the film a "healing fiction".¹¹

Title and companion book

The title comes from Ford Madox Brown's 1855 painting The Last of England, inspired by the emigration to Australia of the sculptor Thomas Woolner in 1852; the painting shows a couple nervously grasping each other aboard a boat with the White Cliffs of Dover behind them. Jarman's film opens with a comparable scene of passage, a group huddled on a London dock awaiting an unknown fate.⁴

Jarman published a journal of the same name with Constable in 1987, written after the shooting of the film and in the aftermath of his AIDS diagnosis; it was reissued as Kicking the Pricks by Vintage in 1996.⁷^•⁴ A Queensland Art Gallery retrospective program notes that both the film and the book lament the decline of the United Kingdom during the 1980s.¹²

Release and reception

The BBFC first classified the film for cinema release on 8 September 1987, at 91m 20s, for the distributor Blue Dolphin Film Dists Ltd; home-entertainment versions followed from Island Visual Arts (1988), Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment (1998), and Second Sight Films (2003), each running about 87 minutes.¹ The film has been shown in repertory cinemas in recent years and is cataloged by the BFI as an 87-minute feature.⁵

Critical response has been divided. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 60% Tomatometer from 10 reviews and a 67% audience score from more than 1,000 ratings.⁸ Nick De Semlyen of Empire gave it 3 of 5 stars, writing that Jarman "mars his brilliance by making his almost wordless film often unwatchable and the message unintelligible"; Derek Malcolm of The Guardian located the film's chief virtue in its technological proficiency and judged it "much more a personal than a political film".⁸ Frameline's 1988 program noted that the film had been "swamped with a tide of homophobic hate from critics" while defending its "modest intentions and sensitive address".³

Place in Jarman's work

The BFI lists The Last of England alongside Edward II (1991) and Blue (1993) as among Jarman's best-known works, linked to the zeitgeist of Britain under the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and calls it "Jarman's darkest vision, a terrifying howl against Thatcherism" culminating in the sequence of a grief-stricken bride tearing off her wedding dress.¹³ The BFI's list of essential Jarman films calls it "Jarman's angriest film", noting critics' comparisons with Humphrey Jennings' wartime documentary Listen to Britain (1942), against which Jarman's film exposes "the rot that lies beneath".¹⁴ It was the second of Jarman's feature collaborations with Tilda Swinton, who had debuted in Caravaggio (1986) and went on to appear in six more of his films.¹³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026