TYRANNOSAUR

Were it set across the English Channel, Paddy Considine's stunning directorial debut "Tyrannosaur", which he also wrote, could just as easily have been directed by the Dardenne Brothers or Bruno Dumont. It's a film about lives barely lived at the very bottom of the barrel. It's deeply harrowing but also cathartic and ultimately strangely redemptive. It's also a love story about two people whose lives seem blighted never to be touched by that emotion or that feeling.


Its central characters are a hard-drinking Scot wallowing in self-pity and a hatred of almost everyone and everything around him, except perhaps the abused kid across the road, and the soft-spoken, pragmatic woman into whose charity shop he stumbles one day. They are played magnificently by Peter Mullan and Olivia Coleman. Equally good is Eddie Marsan, unusually cast against type, as the woman's despicable, abusive husband who thinks nothing of urinating over his sleeping wife. These are the kind of people the cinema tends to ignore and they are not really the kind of people we would choose to hang out with but Considine gives them to us in all their flawed, bitter humanity. In particular, he allows us to see into the battered souls of Mullan and Colman which makes the horrors he presents at least bearable. This is certainly not the easiest film to watch but it is hugely rewarding. Neither is it the kind of film that wins Oscars; the Academy could never handle anything this raw, yet it is essential viewing nevertheless. It's one of the best films I've seen this year.