The Beach

Leonardo DiCaprio - Richard
Tilda Swinton - Sal
Virginie Ledoyen - Françoise
Guillaume Canet - Étienne
Staffan Kihlbom - Christo
Robert Carlyle - Daffy

If you can swallow the spurious premise of Alex Garland’s backpack-busting best-seller The Beach, you will find much to enjoy in the Trainspotting team's latest literary adaptation. Because, despite eco-scandal and negative advance word, this is a pacy youth-generation thriller with a rollicking soundtrack and a sharp millennial message about how travel does not broaden dangerously narrow minds.

Leonardo DiCaprio is backpacker Richard, who thinks he's worldly-wise, but is so "the young American abroad" when he seeks adventure and danger in Thailand. A strange encounter with crazed Daffy (Robert Carlyle), who rants of a perfect, secret beach, seems the travel tip for him. And he recruits a French girl he fancies rotten; Françoise (Virginie Ledoyen) and her amiable boyfriend Étienne (Guillaume Canet) to join him on a mysterious, funny, scary journey to the spectacularly beautiful (cinematographer Darius Khondji) haven.

There Sal (Tilda Swinton) holds sway over a community of drop-outs who are kind of a cross between the Swiss Family Robinson and an apocalyptic water sport cult. Like Garland's novel, the film will be compared with Lord of the Flies as the absence of societal constraints and concerns creates a moral vacuum for wild things to rumpus mightily. The Beach is more a microcosm of the modern world, though, with a more experienced gang and their alternative attempts to connect with one another driven by their secrets, desires, jealousies and competitiveness. They import their own serpents into this paradise. Richard is more than a little disturbed, as we learn from a voiceover that borders on intrusive but underlines his alienation. His fixation with 'Nam movies could be spelled out more clearly to explain his solitary stint in the jungle turning into a pathological commando game.

DiCaprio is perfect as the smart-arsed thrill-seeker and the more wry narrator with hindsight, Richard remains a self-centred Westerner imposing his shallow fantasies of paradise onto Thailand. Indeed, by switching from English to an American protagonist, the filmmakers have helped heighten the story's anti-colonialist theme and the tension with Richard's mostly European beach comrades. Boyle's direction holds a true line between allure and horror, and Hodge's script is intriguing and forceful. It's much better than rumoured: entertaining, engrossing, and ripe for discussion, though lacking the punchy invention and bruise-black satire of Shallow Grave or Trainspotting.