An awkward man approaches an Asian man on the street selling black market DVDs to passersby. He tries to engage the salesman in conversation, first asking if he has any VCR tapes seeing how he himself has no DVD player, then explaining to the man how he likes action movies, then offering up more strained drivel. All his ice-breaking attempts are met with indifference, it is as though the salesman doesn’t even see or hear the other man, and we get the sense that this may not be the first time the man has tried to strike up a conversation with the salesman. After a painful interval of time, the awkward man finally leaves the salesman alone.
This scene comes early Gerard Johnson’s disturbing feature film debut Tony and it sets up beautifully who the “Tony” of the title is. Like Taxi Driver, Dahmer and other films about loners with horrendous violence within themselves, Tony is about how alienation and social awkwardness can eventually manifest a detachment than turns shockingly murderous. But where Taxi Driver let us emphasize with Travis Bickle through his voice-over narration and Dahmer showed us a sociopath with enough cunning and socialization to capably hide his nefarious activities from his family, Tony is presented as a complete social retard, a man without even a crumb of charm or backstory to, in a typical sense, make him endearing to an audience. Yet that early scene is powerful enough to carry us through this twisted character study of a fascinating, disturbing and often reprehensible serial killer.
We learn that Tony lives on public assistance in a shabby apartment in London where his only joys are masturbating and watching cheesy action films. Sometimes he invites junkies into his flat to murder them, their lifeless bodies providing non-judgmental movie-watching company and bedmates. A scene where he tries to talk a hooker down to five euro for “a cuddle” implies that sleeping with the bodies is simply sleeping – so deep runs his loneliness. His story is unforced and organic, just Tony going about business as usual, interacting and failing to connect, his misconnections often resulting in murder, with then a more one-sided and disgusting connection made.
If there is a flaw in this unflinchingly bleak film, it is that it does not pay off on the one near-authentic connection Tony makes. A neighbor knocks on his door to ask if he has a band-aid for her bleeding finger. He invites her in and asks her if she’d like a drink (the only social nicety that he seems to have picked up over the years) and gets her a band-aid. Then they have a typically awkward exchange, but she doesn’t seem put off by him, even offers to have him over for a roast with her and her husband in their flat. When she leaves he is bewildered, saying to himself that “she was nice” in such a way that lets the audience know that such simple, amicable encounters are painfully few and far between in his life. That we never get to see him go to dinner at her flat or have any other interaction with this woman is extremely disappointing, yet also makes sense, for Tony would have no way of knowing how to appropriately make good on the woman’s invitation.
Tony is one of the least glamorous serial killer movies ever filmed, arguably more unsparing and sober than past (sub-)sub-genre gold standards like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and the aforementioned Dahmer. That said, if you’re willing to meet a sick soul like Tony half way, he’ll do nothing less than rivet you.
