Hyena

Hyena (18)

UK 2015 112 mins Dir: Gerard Johnson Cast: Peter Ferdinando, Stephen Graham, Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring, Richard Dormer

The best sequence in disturbing new British crime drama Hyena is almost certainly the one that opens the film. Scored to a dreamily woozy soundtrack by Matt Johnson of band The The (also the brother of the film’s director, Gerard), we see a group of men violently storm a London night club in slow motion, their brutal acts lent an alien sense of surrealism through some richly intoxicating neon blue lighting.

The men are subsequently revealed to be corrupt undercover police officers, not so much treading the fine line between law and order as ferociously obliterating it with truncheons and fire extinguishers. As the film’s title suggests, this is a world in which every character’s feral instincts are lurking below the surface, a world of raging, howling masculinity in which the divide between good and bad couldn’t be more hazy. Little wonder that Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn’s ringing endorsement adorns the film’s poster: this is a movie in which violence is both condemned and also, arguably, more than a little glorified.

Unfortunately, little else in rest of the film manages to be as distinctive or striking as that opening, well-acted and atmospheric though it is. The aforementioned cops are headed up by the amoral Michael (A Field in England’s Peter Ferdinando), a leather jacket-wearing dinosaur who commits all manner of felonies under his jurisdiction as a London rozzer.

Like the eponymous hyena, Michael is a creature of the night, prowling and circling around the moral carnage of London’s seedy east end. His life without rules is complicated however when he attempts to bring down a pair of hideous Albanian gangster brothers after a Turkish criminal associate of his is brutally murdered. To complete the deal (and the clichés), he’s also being investigated by the smarmy Nick (Richard Dormer from Good Vibrations) and reluctantly ends up having to kowtow to superior officer – and former enemy – David (Stephen Graham).

Ferdinando is an effective casting choice, his features (frequently caught by Johnson in piercingly effective close-ups) conveying both seething hatred and surprising sympathy. Graham also registers strongly as Michael’s one-time associate, a man who has seemingly repented for his former ways only to slip back into a cycle of violence and corruption. The problem is, we’ve seen all of this before. For all of the movie’s visual atmosphere, gritty sense of location and occasional character nuance, it’s more a tick list of familiar conventions, right down to the female Albanian sex slave whose plight might in fact prompt a change of heart in the central anti-hero. This may seem a little familiar if you’ve seen David Cronenberg’s (superior) Eastern Promises.

There’s also a bit too much leering focus on the more graphic moments, something that’s made worse by the film’s insistence on tired clichés. However, there’s no denying that in the central figure of Michael, director Johnson has created an intriguing monster, one condemned to live – and possibly die – in a brutal world of his own creation.