Naked, as implied by its title, is raw, uncompromising cinema, the least comforting manifestation to date of what director Mike Leigh calls his "celebration of human experience"; yet there are also moments of tenderness, necessary chinks of compassion spearing the murk. It is also bitingly, appallingly funny. And it is a masterpiece.

The film was borne out of Leigh's then preoccupations with the tension between spiritual and material values, some tougher aspects of the relationship between the sexes, and above all, a profound sense of impending, apocalyptic doom. 'Pre-Millennium Tension', Tricky called it in 1996, for an album steeped in paranoia, "psychic pollution" and regret. "Forever - what does that mean?" asks his lover. "It means we'll manage" Tricky grimly retorts. Manage. For Naked's damaged roster of characters, churning out their faded sexual rituals or wearily braced for more verbal and physical trauma, simply 'managing' would be a desirable state to attain.

As Leigh told 'Cineaste' in 1994, "In so far as Naked is about England, the fabric of society is collapsing. People are insecure, there is a sense of disintegration which is, as much as anything else, a legacy of the Tories."

Almost everybody in Naked is on the move, arriving or departing, to Andrew Dickson's driving, melancholy score. But rarely digging in, lending the film its picaresque quality - a latter-day pilgrim's progress through the Inferno. As befitting a film dealing with the end of days, mythical and Biblical references abound, from 'The Iliad' to the 'Book Of Revelation': Johnny's number of the Beast 'barcode' rant had been prompted by a pamphlet handed to the actor in the street, and its execution - an astonishing verbal juggling act in silhouette - would take around two dozen takes to perfect.

Thewlis still receives plaudits for Johnny, and still receives work off the back of it. Steven Spielberg once requested an audience with him, after Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma spent a night arguing about the film. "I get this quite a lot" he muses. "People either come up to me and say 'You changed my life', 'That was me', or 'You said everything that I've ever thought'. A few religious nuts in America wrote to me saying 'Remember, God loves you.'"

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