‘Tyrannosaur’ is a devastating insight into toxic masculinity
★★★★☆ — written and directed by Paddy Considine, starring Peter Mullan, Olivia Colman and Eddie Marsan, 2011
Some films sell themselves. Perhaps they boast a logline like no other, or a title that cannot be ignored. Others I will watch solely for a writer or director, or a cast that practically guarantees success. Sometimes a little persuasion is required—awards and media buzz never go amiss, but even a single good review, professional or otherwise, can be enough to sell a film.
With Tyrannosaur, it was the poster.
You can see every part of the film right there, in that single image—a dark and dangerous history buried deep beneath a cold, unamiable exterior. Every part of the poster looks dead, from the trees to the tyrannosaurus’ skeleton — even the silhouetted figure stands lifelessly in the centre.
So it is in Tyrannosaur: a world where all the goodness seems to have died—and the parts of it that still live seem like no force for good. It sounds naive to watch a film for its marketing—yet, given that the strength of cinema lies in its visual storytelling, it bodes well for a poster to say so much.
Fortunately, Tyrannosaur does not disappoint. It tells the intertwining story of Joseph, confrontational, unpleasant and lonely, and Hannah, a survivor of years of abuse from a husband not too dissimilar from Joseph. Their clashing personalities make them a terrible pair on paper and in practice (though, in strangely unexpected ways in the case of the latter). Their relationship provides companionship and confidence for both—but a taste of these virtues proves dangerous to those who have only known misery for so long.
The film’s title comes from a nickname Joseph had bestowed upon his late wife, Polly. A “big woman,” Joseph recalls that the ground shook when she walked, stirring ripples in cups of tea—like the puddles in the T-Rex scene from Jurassic Park. “I thought it was funny. I was being a cunt,” he admits to Hannah. The true Tyrannosaur is not Polly, nor perhaps even Joseph, but the devastating Todestrieb—the psychological death drive within us all—lurking within those who are pushed too far.
Tyrannosaur is rare in its approach to the subject of abuse. On one half of the story, Hannah suffers through a brutal marriage to her abuser, James. It’s fairly typical in many ways as a survivor story. It wills her to escape without ever offering her the means to do so: when Joseph tells Hannah to leave James and turn to her family, she replies that they wouldn’t believe her. Outside the walls of the house in which he is jailor, James is deceptively civil, protected by the stereotypes of his class—surely no one who lives on ‘Manners Estate’ could be so barbaric.
Yet, on the other side of the story, Joseph is every bit as violent and inhospitable as James. In the film’s opening scene, Paddy Considine sets himself a monumental challenge: Joseph commits the cardinal sin of movies, the very defining motif of villainy, and drunkenly kicks his dog to death; Considine spends the rest of the film trying to convince us to change our minds about him. Considine himself seems to be staring out from the screen, daring us to believe that Joseph can be better than he has been—just as Hannah believes—but it isn’t always easy. Violence seems to have a habit of returning to him.
This could be interpreted as whitewashing his aggression or blaming it on the cruel world around him. A belief in self-betterment can be positive—hopeful, even, to believe in the rectifying power of humility and self-awareness—but it can also be dangerous. While Tyrannosaur teases the promise of growth, it also shows how easily toxic people can worm their way back into the lives of the innocent. For every Joseph, there is also a James, doing everything they can to hold on to their power over others: “That’s not the real me,” James pleads one morning as he begs Hannah’s forgiveness for last night’s abuse.
To side with Joseph just because we know him as the protagonist is to fall into the same trap James set for Hannah’s family. Violence may promise easy solutions, but they are hollow and often shortlived. If Tyrannosaur promises anything, it’s that no-one is rewarded for taking the easy way out. Whether one agrees with the sentiment behind this promise is another matter altogether—all the same, Tyrannosaur and Considine cling desperately to whatever scraps of morality can be found in their horrible, horrible story. In such situations as those depicted in the film, it is all one can do to avoid falling into the tempting pit of nihilism.
