In the run-down London neighbourhood he calls home, Tony (Peter Ferdinando) has trouble fitting in. He doesn't have a job, and never has. He can't think of the right thing to say, or the right time to say it. He just wants to make friends, but no one will spare him a thought. His only companionship comes from the ultraviolent 1980s action movies he watches repeatedly on worn VHS tapes in his tiny, spartan flat. But then, Tony has a grisly little habit to pass the lonely hours: he enjoys murdering and dismembering those whom he lures to his home… This first feature by Gerard Johnson is a mordantly deadpan, wickedly humorous take on the serial killer genre. Shot in an intimately realist style (hand-held camerawork, naturalistic lighting), Tony has the look of a morally upright neighbourhood drama. Much of the humour derives from the delicious contrast between this realist surface and the gruesome action it depicts. What moves the film beyond straight horror and gives it a sharp satirical edge, though, is the fact that Tony's victims are all folk one might quite like to rid the world of oneself: wide-o junkie louts, offensive sexual predators, TV license inspectors … Tony's a violent maniac, to be sure; but from another point of view, he's a local hero, cleaning up the streets for everyone's benefit. And contrary to expectations, there is one particularly odd moment of redemption ("he's not such a bad guy after all", we suppose the neighbours whisper). Tony's not amoral, just differently moral: a dysfunctional Travis Bickle for our times. Tony sits loosely in a strand of pseudo-realist horror and comedy currently emerging from the UK: as matter-of-fact about unhinged violence as Mum & Dad (EIFF 2008); exploring a dark undercurrent of violence in a working-class milieu, like Kevorkian's The Disappeared (2008); featuring a morally esoteric anti-superhero, à la Saxon (EIFF 2007). Like these pictures, Tony subverts the rather earnest tradition of British social realism by cloaking a savagely irreverent satire with a realist veneer. Johnson is one to watch.

Screening with:

Full Employment

• Matthias Vogel, Thomas Oberlies /
• Germany /
• 2009 /
• 12 mins

This film follows the newly founded Agency for Assisted Employment, a federal apprenticeship scheme which seeks to place older people in work. We follow Mr Janssen, whose professional line is a somewhat unusual one…

Directors: Matthias Vogel, Thomas Oberlies
Producer: Ulrich Stiehm
Scriptwriters: Matthias Vogel, Thomas Oberlies
Editor: Martin D'Costa
DoP: Martin D'Costa
Music: Ingo Ludwig Frenzel