TIFF Review: Amber Heard, Theo James & Billy Bob Thornton Star In ‘London Fields’

There is a cum-stained shelf in some odious basement that's reserved for cinematic cesspools like "London Fields." Considering the origin and nature of the film, that could very well be its intended destination. The eternal struggle of successfully adapting books for the screen is the attempt at aligning a particular directorial vision with the impregnable imagination of the reader. Pulpy and controversial novels like Martin Amis' dystopian "London Fields," where lust, love, and death get caught up in a perverse orgy of bondage and sleaze, might prove once and for all that some material is best left to fester in the imagination. Whatever director Matthew Cullen and writer Roberta Hanley have cooked up with this screen adaptation, it's nothing if not a debauched hodgepodge for the senses that dares you to abandon it at almost every turn.

In some not-so-distant future (Amis' novel was written in 1989 and set in 1999, but the film associates with no year), Samson...