Tyrannosaur
Paddy Considine's feature debut is a bleak slog into the male psyche.
SCREENINGS:
Friday, September 16, 6 p.m.
Visa Screening Room (189 Yonge Street)
Saturday, September 17, 4 p.m.
Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles Street West)
It may not be the greatest film about masculinity ever made (see: The Shining, Deliverance, Glengarry Glenn Ross), but the first feature from actor-turned-writer/director Paddy Considine is certainly the best film about masculinity that’s framed by two different dog homicides. Aging tough guy Joseph (Peter Mullan) stalks around his small English town, starting trouble in pubs and banging on an old tin shed with a sledgehammer for fun. After one nasty drunken brawl with a bunch of kids, he takes refuge in a second-hand clothing shop, where he meets Hannah (an excellent Olivia Colman), who offers to pray for his soul.
At home, Hannah’s got her own mess of problems with her abusive husband (Eddie Marsan). Considine posits a lager-drunk, white-knuckle world where every man, no matter what age, is capable of brutal, soul-destroying violence, making Tyrannosaur feel at times like a thoroughly realized bad-ass fantasia. But as in every Stallone film, such bad-assery belies the seeds of salvation. And it’s here that the film finds its footing not as a winking send-up of thick-necked machismo (see: Drive), but as a redemption story with the feel of a bar-room parable. On the whole, though, and despite an off-tone pub singalong interlude, Tyrannosaur is violently, unremittingly bleak.