TYRANNOSAUR directed by Paddy Considine (UK, 2011)
Hannah – “I feel safe with you” Joseph – ” I am not a nice human being. Nobody is safe with me”.
That Peter Mullan is so convincing as a raging drunk in this movie is no great surprise, particularly as it is a kind of reprise of his leading role in Ken Loach’s My Name Is Joe – even his name is practically the same.
If this were simply another story of one man’s infinite capacity for violence and self-destructive behaviour it would struggle to hold the attention for the whole movie.
It is the role of Hannah, played superbly by Olivia Colman that makes this movie so memorable. On the surface she is a happily married middle-class woman living in a detached executive home and working in a Christian charity shop to ‘do her bit’ for society. Joseph brands her as a cake baking do-gooder who knows nothing of the real world. Ironically, she knows as much, if not more, of living with cruelty, with the crucial difference being that she experiences this as a victim rather than as a perpetrator.
Her abusive husband James (Eddie Marsan) is even scarier than Joseph because his aggression is more insidiously vindictive and less predictable. His psychosis is not fuelled by drink but by something more deep-rooted and sinister. Our introduction to him is when he returns home late to find Hannah sleeping on the couch and promptly urinates over her. We learn something of the back story of Joseph but are left to speculate precisely how and why Hannah and James’ marriage disintegrated so catastrophically. Continue reading
