Gerard Johnson’s Tony is a special film for me, forever bound up in my head with being nineteen and home from university for the holidays. If I wasn’t out catching up with old friends from school, I’d hang out with my parents until they went to bed, and then sit up until three or four in the morning, watching whatever was on Sky Arts or the Horror Channel. As the sun was just starting to come out, I’d go out for a walk and a cigarette. Noone with a working set of eyes would ever describe Ilford as a pretty town, but it has a certain beauty when seen in the pre-dawn light, and I’d never really appreciated that until then.
Dalston, at least through Johnson’s lens, has the same aesthetic as Ilford does in my memories, but what’s more important is that Tony feels the way Ilford feels at four in the morning. Maybe it’s the isolation of the main character that mirrors the feeling of being the only one on the streets, maybe it’s the combination of where it’s set and the cinematography, but there’s an aesthetic to Tony that no other film I’ve seen has.
For those who haven’t had the pleasure of seeing this 2009 serial killer character study, here’s the plot: Tony Benson is unemployed, and living in a council flat in Dalston. He’s a socially awkward loner who obsessively collects ‘80s action films and murders people. The film follows him through his life as he attempts to form connections with strangers, and as he kills.
Tony - played brilliantly by Peter Ferdinando - is interesting in that he’s completely unlike the standard cinematic serial killer. Serial killers in films tend to be of the Hannibal Lecter mold, urbane sophisticates with classical educations who wax philosophical about the deeper meaning behind what they do. Not so our Tony. He’s tragically inarticulate - throughout the film, we see him trying to talk to people and failing due to his strangeness. His defining feature is his inability to communicate - that’s why he lives alone, why he has no friends, why he’s been out of work for twenty years and, perhaps, why he kills - maybe it’s the only way he can feel some kind of connection to another person. The film certainly hints at that (although we never get a full explanation of Tony’s motives). Like Jeffrey Dahmer, Tony keeps the bodies of those he has killed in his flat for some time after the act, and even shares his bed with a rotting corpse. We definitely get the sense that he’s starved of meaningful human contact - at one point, Tony visits a prostitute and asks the price of a cuddle. If he were a real person, he’d probably be an incel.
That brings me to the most interesting part of the film, which is how Tony handles masculinity. Tony Benson is, in every way, a failed man. He’s long-term unemployed; single; friendless; and physically unmasculine. He’s rail-thin and moves awkwardly, with a face that looks perpetually frightened and out of place. He is everything that men are taught not to be, and he knows it - that’s why he’s so obsessed with the cartoonish hypermasculinity of eighties action films. He idolises the typical image of manhood, but it’s an image he can’t live up to. If it were released today, Tony would probably be read as a comment on the violence committed by lonely, bitter men - sadly, it seems to have more or less dropped off the map on release, and I’ve never met anyone else who has seen the film, much less likes it.
Maybe part of the reason for that is the structure of the film. The typical serial killer flick is a crime film; the protagonists are police officers, and the story is essentially a chase narrative, with the audience kept in suspense as to how much longer the antagonist can avoid detection. Tony, on the other hand, is a character study. We follow Tony as he goes through his life, we get to know him, and that’s about it. The film has a slow, meditative quality that reminds me of a lot of Scandinavian cinema, which has never been a particularly commercial style here.
Anyway, watch the film, see what you think, and let me know in the comments.
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