Tony is a weird, grubby little gem of a horror movie that grips as strongly as it repels.
A Dennis Nielson tribute set on an ultra miserabalist Hackney council estate hardly sounds like riveting entertainment, but Gerard Johnson’s Tony, deconstructionist take on everyday serial killing, manages to dig some very black laughs out of the grim setting.
Tony (a perfectly odd Peter Ferdinando, recently unrecognisable in the equally odd High Rise) is the type of strange, sad little man you often see wandering around Poundland, replete with brown puffer coat, weird hairdo and carrier bag.
And a flat full of corpses.
He’s naturally the first suspect when a local child goes missing, and the film makes the most of the irony, Tony getting away with mutilating dozens of victims, but being hounded when he’s falsely accused of paedophilia.
There’s also a touch of urban alienation here, with Tony killing so that he has someone to talk to, propping up bodies and offering them tea in front of the TV, then killing a license inspector who threatens to remove it. Tony’s viewing choice is a selection of 80s action movies on VHS, a quirky character attribute that shows how far the rest of the world has moved on from this sad little man.
Johnson capably chronicles some of London’s more dead-end areas (although many of them have since succumbed to gentrification) with bit-parts for the full range of street life, and tension is kept high as Tony lets plenty of possible victims go, leaving you completely in the dark as to who will be attending his ghoulish night-in next, while there are some great moments of hard-to-watch mundanity – a gay clubber offering sex in exchange for a bed gets a hammer to the forehead when his lame conversation runs out – as he routinely disposes of the bodies of people no one cares about.
The setting is surprisingly realistic given the possibility for melodrama. It brings Mike Leigh to mind, and the movie is all the better for it; uncomfortable but occasionally very amusing despite the concrete estate aesthetics. It demystifies its villain, a loner but not a mysterious one, just a boring loser with nothing better to do. Tony is a weird little gem of a movie that grips as strongly as it repels.
For more spine-chilling films to watch over Halloween, check out the much more luxuriant Crimson Peak.
