with Ewan McGregor, Emily Mortimer said, "There's something really liberating about letting it rip and just going for it. There's no way in real life you'll ever be allowed to get up to all that - I mean, unless you were really into kinky stuff." Critical reception Young Adam holds a approval rating on review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes, based on reviews, with an average rating of . The critical consensus states that the film is "A grim mood piece with good performances from the leads." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 67 out of 100 based on 32 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Philip French of The Guardian called it "a cleverly constructed film that holds the attention throughout its economical 95 minutes. The naturalistic acting has considerable power, with Tilda Swinton giving a characteristically unself-regarding performance and Ewan McGregor steering clear of easy charm. But it is a depressing film exuding hopelessness and inviting us to pity the characters rather than share in their tragic condition." A.O. Scott of the New York Times observed, "The storytelling is deliberately disjointed, jumping back and forth in time without warning, so that the meaning of events and the connections among them emerge retrospectively. This creates a mood of unease and dislocation, a noirish dread that persists even after certain crucial mysteries are solved. The narrative scheme, the brooding period atmosphere, the understated score (by David Byrne) and the precision of the acting also make the story seem more interesting than it is. Joe, though in some ways fairly passive, is sexually voracious as well as sexually irresistible . . . In the end, Joe's sexuality, while exhibited with quite a bit more explicitness than the old movies would permit, is also what makes Young Adam feel most dated. Its view of male narcissism, as expressed through erotic need, is not only uncritical but also pretentious. The film follows the novel (and many others like it) in assuming, rather than proving, that its hero's selfishness and failure offer clues to the human condition, rather than evidence of individual limitation." Manohla Dargis of the Los Angeles Times observed, "Unlike the novel, which is written in the first person . . . the film assumes a markedly less claustrophobic, less personal point of view. Everything happens more or less through Joe's eyes, but Mackenzie, having rejected a voice-over narration, never gets inside the