November 20, 2011 [Tyrannosaur]

I'm watching Joseph in Tyrannosaur fuming and feeling the pressure of his own rage and letting it run rampant in sorrow and regret and play itself out—only to let it build again, as frightening a sight as I've seen in a movie in a long time—and I wondered where I'd seen the actor before, Peter Mullan, here so deeply buried in himself that his neck and chin disappear and all that's left are unreadable eyes that hide his disappointment and turn it into something like death. And then I remembered: Syd the refugee handler in Children of Men, a man of infinite humor and brutality willing, if the price is right, to be a good man or a bully-boy—and in either case to act with reckless unconcern for where his elbows and knees and fists might land, your neck or mine, a pregnant woman or the last child.

Here in Tyrannosaur, though, he's asked to calm down and simmer, simmer—then boil over—and to find maybe some hint of compassion, something he doesn't want to tear in half—because, of course, it's always himself he's tearing at, his tiny hands of no need, not with all those teeth and jaws like a machine that could turn a car into a cube. He's a dinosaur, all right, should be long gone—but it's like Jurassic Park in his neighborhood, where he still roars late at night and hunts whenever he's hungry.

The actor Paddy Considine has a friendly face—as a director, though, he saves all hints of friendship for some later date, maybe long after everything's gone and whatever new age will replace ours has re-imagined our DNA so thoroughly that we're thankfully unrecognizable. But before extinction, Joseph finds an opportunity to shed his skin and change—but the woman he'd terrorized, befriended, and finally decided to love evolves under the pressures of her degrading life and turns into her own version of a thunder lizard, killing her mortal enemy and curling up in exhaustion—but with Joseph, somehow, the two of them waiting for the comet to hit and send them into the last blanketing winter they'll ever need, resting at last.