Sexy Beast (Glazer, 2000)

In many ways, Sexy Beast (Jonathan Glazer, 2000) is a standard 'heist' film. There is a place containing an abundance of valuable material, but has the best security system. The boss wants to pull together a team of all-star burglars to do the job. Our protagonist is the retired veteran that the whole plan hinges on. In reality though, it is much different. Sexy Beast not only plays with the conventions of the heist film, it incorporates stylistic techniques that are completely foreign to the genre.

Glazer uses flashback to fill in the background for much of the story, which opens after Gary 'Gal' Dove (Ray Winstone) has retired to a fantasy-like Spanish villa. This technique is not new to the heist film, but does stir up the story, revealing crucial information to the audience in small bite-sized doses. We even cut away from scenes before the climax and get the rest of the information through flashback, such as the last few moments of the super-disturbed Don Logan (Ben Kingsley).

A more uncommon stylistic choice is the use of fantastic or elements that are do not fit in our world. The most notable of these elements is the recurrence of the demented rabbit figure that haunts Gal and eventually is damned to eternity with Don underneath Gal's pool. This creature, which puzzlingly bears more than a striking resemblance to 'Frank' from Richard Kelly's film from the same year, Donnie Darko, does not seem to exist strictly in a 'dream' world. The final shot that takes us underneath the repaired broken heart at the bottom of the pool, while revealing the Dove families proverbial skeletons in the closet, also suggests that the rabbit is more of a living symbol than a dream fantasy. The rabbit figure seems to represent many things in this film, including innocence, secrets, lies and guilt.