Tyrannosaur Review

Paddy Considine's directorial debut offers relentless miserablism

Comments (0) By Melissa Anderson Thursday, Nov 17 2011

T yrannosaur opens with a dog being kicked to death by its master, Joseph (Peter Mullan), a Leeds widower curdled by his own fury; near the film's end, he harms another pooch even more savagely. "An animal can only take so much humiliation before it snaps," he says in epistolary voice-over — a truism that also applies to Hannah (Olivia Colman), an abused wife whom Joseph meets at a Christian-run thrift shop.

Tyrannosaur

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Laemmle's Sunset 5

8000 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90046

Category: Movie Theaters

Region: Out of Town

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The feature-length directorial debut of Paddy Considine, an actor best known for In America and My Summer of Love, Tyrannosaur is British miserablism at its most numbingly brutal and blunt. The ferocious batterings (and worse) inflicted on Hannah by her church-pillar husband (Eddie Marsan) play not as unwavering, "honest" depictions of abject reality but as a relentless, near-gratuitous wallow in other people's pain. The tentative friendship that develops between Joseph and Hannah, rather than providing a small glimmer of hope among all the grimness, demonstrates Considine's own unsteadiness with plot coherency and logic, especially during the final scene.

At best, Tyrannosaur is an actor's showcase: Although it's no stretch for Mullan to play another coot drunk on beer and rage, Colman's transformation from a bruised and broken woman to a sunny, solicitous store clerk is alchemic. —Melissa Anderson (Sunset 5)