Tony (2009)
Country: UK
Production Company: AbbottVision and the UK Film Fund present an AbbottVision Production
Producer: Dan McCulloch
Co-producer: Kirstie Edgar
Executive Producer: Paul Abbott
Director: Gerard Johnson
Screenplay: Gerard Johnson
Cinematographer: David Higgs
Editor: Ian Davies
Music: The The
Production Designer: Naomi Reed
Costume Designer: Suzie Harman
Makeup Designer: Anna Cash
Sound Mixer: Tom Barrow
Sound Editor: Jovan Ajder
Sound Effects Editor: Peter Crooks
Length: 73 mins.
Cast: Peter Ferdinando (Tony), Ricky Grover (Davey's Dad), Kerryann White (Davey's Mum), Vicky Murdock (Dawn), Neil Maskell (Mike Hemmings), Lorenzo Camporese (Alex), Francis Pope (Smudger), George Russo (Mackey), Cyrus Desir (Dealer), Frank Boyce (Publican), Lucy Flack (Prostitute), Ian Groombridge (CID Detective), Ian Kilgannon (TV License inspector), Mark Mooney (Sunbed shop owner), Greg Kam (DVD seller), Sam Kempster (Davey), Neil Large, Rob Seth-Smith (drug takers), Jill Keen (Madam), Callum Madge (Corpse in lounge), Adrian Walker (Corpse in bed).
Synoposis: Tony is a socially awkward loner who hasn't worked in over 20 years. Victimized or ignored by those around him, he spends his time alone in his grim council flat watching action videos and looking at porn. His bland exterior hides the fact that he's a serial killer, preying on drug addicts and cruising the local gay bar for victims. However his world begins to disintegrate when he is forced to take a job and then a local 10-year-old boy goes missing.
Review: Filmed in 12 days in the rundown neighborhoods of London's Hackney district of Dalston, home to Mike Leigh's Naked and Stephen Frear's Dirty Pretty Things, Tony is a slice of British kitchen sink realism (with added entrails) that recalls the work of Leigh, Ken Loach and particularly Shane Meadows, succeeding brilliantly where Stephen Sheil's similarly grim but much less satisfying horror hybrid Mum & Dad (2008) - which starred Meadows regular Perry Benson – disappointed.
Beautifully shot on Technicolor stock, the film makes excellent use of London locations, with the miserable grey council blocks and rundown market places giving way to the neon signs of Piccadilly Circus and the bright lights of the West End as Tony reaches a form of catharsis and broadens his hunting ground. The biggest delight here is the performance of Peter Ferdinando, who dropped 35 pounds to play the title character and is pitch-perfect in capturing the social awkwardness of this pathetic loner, desperate to make a connection but unable to do so other than with a lump hammer and a mains lead.
Ricky Grover as a violent father who causes Tony some grief.
The character's awkward interactions provide some welcome humor - asking a bootleg DVD seller whether he prefers karate or kung fu after admitting he only owns a video recorder; scanning a prostitute's hand-written price list before asking "how much for a cuddle?"; offering a cup of tea to a clearly long-dead bed partner - but his impotent quoting from action movies pays off in a brilliantly acted scene as Tony quotes a Gene Simmons/Rutger Hauer interchange from Gary Sherman's Wanted: Dead or Alive, before unexpectedly screaming at his reflection - the effect is both shocking and hugely sympathetic.
Director Gerard Johnson infuses the set piece scenes with style and tension, a visit to a poetry-quoting drug dealer with a comatose girl companion ("She's been bled") is more David Lynch than Guy Ritchie and the scene where Tony offers to show two visitors some of his VHS collection (name-checking such 80s obscurities as Peter Manoogian's Enemy Territory and Roger Corman's Cocaine Wars) is notable for the fact that we feel more concern for Tony's safety than those of his potential victims - at least until he whites his face and produces a carrier bag and some duct tape.
Peter Ferdinando as Tony contemplates his newest friend.
The film is not without its problems, one character, allowed to go free early on, is never heard from again and there's a questionable depiction of a homosexual character as deserving of death because he seeks a one night stand with the wrong man – he also snorts coke, demands alcohol and likes trance music in case we need further reason. However these are small matters when measured against such strong performances (Ricky Grover is also terrifying as the grieving father whose bulk and impotent rage are the antithesis of Tony's repression and skeletal frame), haunting sound design and music from the director's brother Matt Johnson of The The (it's a family affair, as Peter Ferdinando is their cousin) and, the odd severed limb notwithstanding, a laudable commitment to avoiding the clichés of the horror film, leading to a downbeat - some will say anticlimactic - ending that makes perfect sense for the character but refuses to pander to genre conventions.
Tony will be released on DVD by Revolver Entertainment on April 6th.
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