THIS is the already notorious one with the bowl of custard and other assorted kitchen ingredients not found in Delia Smith's How To Cook books, but here being put to use in a way that rhymes with cook if said in a Yorkshire accent.

Custard's last stand for Ewan McGregor and the sauce-smeared Emily Mortimer comes late on in a grave, meditative Scottish study of sex, death and guilt that will divide opinion as much as that ambiguous sex scene.

If you live life on a metaphysical plane, then Young Adam may well be the apple of your eye. So too for those who love a grime-dusted Ewan McGregor in or, often, out of chunky-knit sweaters.

However, anyone who can spot pretension a mile off will feel bored and as redundant as the razor in the bathroom glass of hairy arm-pitted Tilda Swinton.

Young Adam is full of torrid sex, in short, frantic, often joyless bursts, below deck, on deck, along the towpath, in the kitchen. There appears to be little else to do on the grey waters of the Clyde of the 1950s, as depicted in the existentialist source novel of cult Beat writer Alexander Trocchi - friend of William S Burroughs and fellow drug fiend - and now transferred in explicit, candid detail to a grainy screen by The Last Great Wilderness director David McKenzie.

Looking his most hollowed since playing chemical wreck Renton in Trainspotting, McGregor is young writer Joe, a drifter whose literary leanings play second fiddle to his seduction of women. He has taken work on a Glasgow barge, where the monotony is broken in the arms of Ella (a typically pallid yet sensual Swinton), neglected wife of the heavy-drinking captain, Les (Peter Mullan, hardy perennial of such movies).

When Joe and Les drag the body of a young woman (Mortimer) from the river, matters turn murkier than the M62 in winter, but McKenzie's back-tracking film still moves about as slowly as that motorway's traffic.

Joe throws himself into ever more desultory flings: his pleasure always short-lived in pursuit of unattainable freedom, a la Trainspotting. His lasting sensation is alienation; watching Young Adam, I know the feeling.

Updated: 08:49 Friday, September 26, 2003