Screenplay by John Hodge (based on the novel by Irvine Welsh)
Directed by Danny Boyle
Starring Ewan McGregor, Ewan Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Kevin McKidd, Kelly Macdonald
Channel 4 Films – in selected cinemas now

I hadn’t seen Trainspotting on a big screen since 1996 and in purely cinematic terms it holds up well. It’s a terrific piece of filmmaking which was clearly a trailblazer and trendsetter in multiple ways – not least because of its fantastic soundtrack and the fun of seeing the two Ewans, Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle in younger, thinner days.

Having said that, I had forgotten how profoundly depressing it is – and that’s not just because of the dead baby crawling along the ceiling. It was hailed at the time for its ‘dark comedy’, but in 2026 it’s just… dark. The jokes such as they are feel shallow and flippant – and the mannered, affected dialogue hasn’t aged well at all. Watching from the shadows of my seventh decade, I felt a certain nostalgia for the ‘Cool Britannia’ of the 1990s, when a tale of drug-fuelled hopelessness felt emblematic of everything the country was going to leave behind now that Things Could Only Get Better.

I remembered rooting for Ewan McGregor in his battle to kick free of his so-called friends and his own self-destructive addiction, but on a Monday night in Stockport in 2026 it was hard to give a shit about any of the characters – even Renton. I remember Ben Elton doing a great riff on how we might not think Trainspotting was so cool if Renton had a West Country accent. I wonder if back in 1996 we cared more about the psychological waste surrounding addiction. The incongruous humour was a way of expressing that ambivalence. In 2026 I’m not sure anyone has much time for addiction. This could just be me getting old, of course, but I have a gut sense that the zeitgeist has changed and the opprobrium directed towards Class A drugs is more about the lives lost and the cost to the communities ravaged by the production and transport of the stuff. Why should we care about a bunch of (white) Scottish wasters when the real damage is happening somewhere far off-screen?

Trainspotting is a fundamentally forgiving film which sits uncomfortably in unforgiving times.

But perhaps the most salutary part of the experience was settling into our seats and watching the rest off the audience filing in and my wife and I whispering to each other: ‘He wasn’t born, she wasn’t born, they weren’t born…’ I think we were the oldest people in the screen, and perhaps the only ones to have seen it on its initial release. Now, that’s depressing! 8/10