Hyena
Gerard Johnson (2014)
Hyena opened this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) and the screening in the Festival Theatre was preceded by words from Chris Fujiwara, EIFF’s artistic director, as well as the film’s writer-director Gerard Johnson. Both warned that Hyena was dark and shocking but they justified these characteristics in very different terms. Fujiwara saw the piece as ‘emblematic’ of the essential quality which he said the Festival programme strove to represent, namely ‘intensity of aesthetic experience’. He also stressed that Hyena was not a lowering experience but rather a reflection of the EIFF’s aim to show the wonder, richness and mysteriousness of the world. Johnson, more Jack-the-Laddish, said he hoped the audience had had a few drinks beforehand and advised us to keep reminding ourselves, when the going got tough, that ‘it’s only a movie, it’s only a movie …’. Perhaps that was ironic but it got a laugh and that’s all that counts, isn’t it? I did think of walking out and afterwards felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t. But, if I had, I would also have felt frustrated (and I’d have heard in my head Gerard Johnson chuckling that I couldn’t take it). There were several walkouts – from what I could see, all women (of various ages), and I was glad they walked, given what’s done to the main female character in Hyena. I had a seat near the back and I think I was first out of the Festival Theatre when the film ended – too soon to know whether silence in the auditorium, as the closing credits began, indicated shock and awe or disapproval or if it was the prelude to applause.
Hyena is set in present day London. (The production design by Marie Lanna is entirely convincing.) Its main character – I assume the title character – is Michael Logan, who heads a police drugs squad team. The other members of the team eventually desert him, leaving Michael the singular hyena (an animal which runs with the pack but is despised by other beasts). Conceiving the London underworld as a ‘jungle’ isn’t strikingly original but the scheme of the film is at least coherent in following this conception through. There are four species in the jungle. The first, Michael and his colleagues, is corrupt and/or racist and/or criminal: they’re prepared to cut a deal with international drug traffickers – benefitting financially, enjoying the traffickers’ product but also succeeding in making arrests. The traffickers are the second species: an ‘international’ dealer in this context means a foreigner, usually of swarthy, brutal aspect and, at least in the case of two Albanian brothers whose appearance on the scene triggers much of the plot, with sadistically misogynistic tendencies. The third species comprises other cops who are plotting, either through career ambition fuelled by long-standing enmity towards Michael or pure malevolence, to destroy his team and its work. The moral distinction between the second and third species is that the latter lacks the former’s propensity for expressing its nastiness through cutting people into pieces. The fourth species are women – an endangered species on the evidence of their small number in Hyena and the way in which the few that appear are treated. The only ones who are safe are the wives and children of species two and three – there’s an ethnic family get-together involving the Albanians and Michael’s nemesis Nick Taylor has a cigarette lighter inscribed ‘World’s Best Dad’. (This struck me as an unlikely gift nowadays from kids to their father, even if he is a disreputable cop, but it echoes the irony-for-a-laugh attitude mentioned above. There’s another pathetic example of this in the closing stages of Hyena when two women and the Albanians holding them captive sit in a room with the Norman Wisdom police comedy On the Beat playing on the television.[1])
As Hannah McGill noted in her good piece in The List, Gerard Johnson’s film is ‘more nihilistic than polemical’. It would be worrying if people enjoyed it – as Johnson said he hoped we would – but it’s hard to see that many people will. It’s more likely they’ll take Hyena, in spite of the only-a-movie playing down, as a fearless exposé of how bad things are. Johnson isn’t trying to change the minds of his audience, few of whom will naturally have any sympathy for the drug traffickers or be predisposed to think well of the police. On the contrary: the biggest laugh in the Festival Theatre was heard when one group of cops got arrested by another. At the start of the film, Michael’s team carries out a raid on a night club. Before doing so, they put on items of police uniform that suggest fancy dress – perhaps it’s only the violence of their attack on the lawbreakers in the club that’s meant to convince you they really are cops. They and the other police are nearly all mindless: Johnson’s script allows only Michael Logan any kind of conscience or divided feelings about what he’s doing. Peter Ferdinando brings great commitment to the role – he’s especially strong in Michael’s reactions to the grisly deaths that he witnesses first hand – but the characterisation is monotonous since Ferdinando is given no opportunity to suggest that Michael or anything in his life could once have been better than they are now. When Stephen Graham arrives on screen as Michael’s ex-colleague and old enemy David Knight, brought in to head the investigation into the Albanians, the film improves for a while. This is due in part simply to the reverse of the fresh-face-on-screen syndrome: it’s because Graham is familiar and has given good and varied performances in films and on television in recent years that he evokes a world outside that of Hyena – in the fetid atmosphere of the film, he’s a breath of fresh air. But the effect is also due to his skill. Graham shapes the character in a way that none of the other actors does: he shows you David Knight’s resentment, his determination to be in control, his wariness in what Knight continues to see as competition with Michael. Some of the acting in smaller parts – from MyAnna Buring as Michael’s girlfriend Lisa, Thomas Craig as his boss, and Richard Dormer as Taylor – is just bad.
As well as the warnings from Chris Fujiwara and Gerard Johnson, there were notices in the theatre entrance about strobe effects and it was these, rather than most of the violent bits, which caused me to avert my eyes. My ability to tolerate the violence wasn’t because it wasn’t revolting. It’s rather that the pretentious lack of intelligence behind this ‘uncompromising’ film has a curiously diluting effect: Gerard Johnson, as a purveyor of bloodshed and dismembering, is no Quentin Tarantino. This isn’t just a matter of (questionable) flair: the violent acts in Tarantino’s films are at least usually grounded in character. The only strongly offensive sequences in Hyena – although these are more than enough – are those featuring Ariana (Elisa Lasowski), a young woman bought and sold into and out of sex slavery. Although Hyena is all about physical and sexual abuse, it ends before what looks set to be the climactic scene of violence, when the Albanian brothers have been released from police custody, hold Ariana and Lisa captive and, in doing so, lay a trap for Michael to step into. The brothers are released, as far as I could see, only in order to allow this to happen. The script relies considerably on lazy plotting – such as the delay in the brothers’ finding out that Ariana has escaped from the house where she was previously being kept prisoner, and Michael’s getting hold of, in improbable circumstances, crucial and revealing conversations recorded by David Knight. This abominable film’s most disturbing after-effect is the thought of Chris Fujiwara, who seems a pleasant man, relishing its aesthetic intensity (in fact the ‘intensity’ is almost entirely sonic, in the form of Matt Johnson’s bludgeoning score and whatever the sound people have done to emphasise its thunderous pulse). When he watches Ariana having a razor drawn down her arm with something then sprayed onto the wound to make it more painful, or being drugged then raped by a hairy Turk to whom the Albanians have sold her (as Hannah McGill suggests, Hyena may appeal to UKIP supporters), does it really remind Fujiwara of the rich, wondrous mystery of the world?
18 June 2014
[1] This may be even more brilliant than I realised because, according to Wikipedia: ‘Wisdom gained a celebrity status in … many Eastern Bloc countries, particularly in Albania, where his films were the only ones by Western actors [sic] permitted by dictator Enver Hoxha to be shown.’