Tony

Gerard Johnson’s feature debut is a British companion to John McNaughton’s chilling Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. So… just what we’ve all been waiting for.

It’s not that Tony is a poorly made piece of cinema. Yes, it’s ugly, but that ugliness – both moral and aesthetic – is appropriate in a story about the everyday pathology of murder, and how the metropolitan anomie of tower blocks and pent-up despair can be transformed into a kind of psychic corruption. But does that mean you’ll want to watch it?

As embodied by Peter Ferdinando, Tony is an outsider who murders because he can. He is clearly ill (he sleeps next to a decomposing corpse) but if he takes any pleasure in what he does, it is only insomuch as he feels more comfortable around the dead than the living.

Johnson and cinematographer David Higgs shoot this mundane horror in drab, flat colours, accentuating the invasive intimacy with which we’re thrown into Tony’s life. The entire screen has the greasy texture of accumulated filth.

But Tony is a man who lacks any kind of interiority. In part, that’s the point – he’s a cipher whose fate is left resolutely unresolved. But at the same time, Tony is a creation of tabloid fever-dreams. He’s an unemployed, repressed homosexual who watches violent films and visits prostitutes. One character calls him ‘a noncy-faced cunt’, and he is. He’s not a chilling psychopath, he’s a reassuring fantasy of evil: he’s looks the way we want our murderers to look – weird, identifiable, not like us.

It doesn’t help that there are a couple of narrative clangers that further shake your faith (no one would invite this guy to dinner with their children). In one scene, Tony looks at himself in the mirror. “You’re a fly on a pile of shit,” he says. Quite.

Matt Bochenski

Anticipation:

A forensic serial killer movie? Sounds unedifying.

Enjoyment:

Very little of that to be found here. Deliberately? Even so…

In Retrospect:

See it and take a shower.