Tyrannosaur

Synopsis: Joseph (Peter Mullan) is a hard-drinking man with serious anger issues that threaten to destroy his life. Hannah (Olivia Colman) is a conservative Christian middle-class woman working at the local opportunity shop. When their lives intersect, it would seem than Hannah may be some sort of kindly saviour to Joseph. But Hannah is not what she seems and her life with abusive husband, James (Eddie Marsan), is driving her to drink and desperate acts.

Paddy Considine has always impressed me as an actor and now he has seriously impressed me with this, his directorial debut. He takes a sordid story, set in a depressed council flat area of Leeds, and makes these troubled characters into people with whom we can identify. So much of this is achieved by the towering performances of Colman and Mullan, and deservedly so many important awards have gone to these actors, as well as to Considine for his direction.

Violence, especially domestic, is not easy to see and so Tyrannosaur is not easy to watch. The opening scene has Joseph drunkenly yelling foul abuse after losing his temper in the pub. Then, horrifically, he loses it at his dog and kicks the creature so savagely it dies. We then see him embroiled in another pool room brawl, and he flees down the street to hide behind a rack of clothing in an op shop. His first encounter with Hannah sees him verbally abusing her also, but amazingly, even though a part of us already hates the man, Mullan lets us see that there is something underneath that is driving him, and perhaps he is not all bad.By contrast, Marsan, as James, simply oozes nastiness. He is the sort of bully who pretends to the world he is a good guy, and even pleads for forgiveness from his wife on the grounds that he is sick. Beneath it all he is an abhorrent creature. Even the man over the road from Joseph is a violent thuggish brute whose companion is a pitbull attached to a leash around his waist.

Colman, as the main woman in the story and opposing number to these rampaging men, is an acting force to be reckoned with and I marvelled at the intensity of emotion that she made so tangible.

Despite all the pain and grief it contains, Considine conceived of his film as love story. It is not your standard romantic flight of fancy, but love of a different sort, born of compassion, protectiveness and sharing of ghastly experiences together. Tyrannosaur could have been simply another offering in the grim British social realist tradition. Fortunately Considine has eschewed the often used quasi-documentary approach common to the style and has chosen instead to give us a very crisp cinematic look with an intensely engaging narrative.

Despite the pain these characters go through, there are moments of tenderness and hope. The character of Sam, a small boy living opposite Joseph, brings an innocently truthful perspective to bear whilst Joseph’s friend Tommy, (Ned Dennehy), though fearsomely scruffy to look at, has a soft compassionate heart underneath. And the scene of a wake in a pub makes us see that no matter how bad things can be, there is support and hope in friendship.

I left the cinema exhausted after this raw and brutal film, and brooding on the nature of the actual and potential violence that lurks in us all, especially men.  I also felt uplifted that there are films that seem so truthful, without excessive artifice, and which take us to the authentic places in the human heart – places of fear, compassion, grace and possibly, redemption.

 

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