REVIEW: Hyena

British cinema has turned dark, portraying London in uncertain terms. With entrenched Balkanisation across religious and cultural lines, and an increasingly disparate demographic, Londoners paper over the speed of their capital’s transformation by paying lip service to vibrancy and tolerance. After all, most people lead lives of regularity; they’re too busy to ponder on the frayed integrity of social capital.

While Shane Meadow’s social realism optimistically approached these issues in films like Somers Town, a new breed of kitchen-sink realists have muddied the waters. Both Ben Wheatley and Hyena’s Gerard Johnston connect with contemporary fears of isolation and violence by genre-melding social realism with elements of thriller and horror. This leads to expressionistic dioramas of a seedy, callous London, infested by a criminality stalking the veneer of the sensible.

Whereas much of Wheatley’s work is drenched in darkly wry humour, Johnston’s barbs are sparse and lack resonance. He borrows from Wheatley’s stable of earthy actors (MyAnna Buring, the ubiquitous Neil Maskell), and Hyena overlaps with the horror-realism of Wheatley’s Kill List, descending into a tumult of Boschian proportions. Such is the grime of its hellish underbelly; Travis Bickle would detect it – it emanates from the smoke haze and dulled neon of secreted cop haunts and venal sex bars.

Johnston’s London is utterly Darwinian: sharply demarcated by tribal lines existentially at odds with one another (‘that’s not how it’s done here’, says Michael to Albanian thugs) shot through with an uncompromising anthropological pessimism. Even the law is merely a pragmatic framework, barely holding the pseudo dichotomy – cops and robbers – in check. This is a London unknown to the tourist traps of Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street or the serene greenery of Richmond upon Thames. This is its raw heart; at the interstices of multicultural degradation where the paint chipped high-rises are flanked by grey market kiosks and pound menu fast food.

Hyena’s story follows Michael (Peter Ferdinando) into the shady world of drug and human traffic, as the film progresses, the plot thickens: double crossings and character motivations dictate the drama, with the film eventually spiralling into a vortex of chaos and murder. Visually, Johnston relies on close-ups and floating camera work, emphasising a docu-realism already evident in a carefully selected, dank and dilapidated series of sets and locations.

Johnston enjoys lingering on his characters without padding out back stories, resulting in some largely opaque supporting roles. None the less, the acting across the board is strong, and the taskforce’s chemistry is as natural as any 60s kitchen sink banter. Johnston often slows down scenes in a slow-mo montage of interaction, with Matt Johnson’s mesmerising score acting as an engine of performativity. The score and use of music contribute greatly to the film’s overall feel, with both composer and director clearly on the same wavelength. Similar, again, to Wheatley’s Kill List, Hyena manages to build a world which is both immersive and labyrinthian, with every claustrophobic hallway and littered room contributing to a sense of dislocation.

Johnston is a promising director. His debut, Tony, was a stark, minimalist venture into the life of a loner caught in the miasma of under-class repetition and stagnation. Here, he’s broadened his ambition with a tale of vice, scant on redemption. Viewers might be disappointed by the film’s ending, but Johnston isn’t here to appease the comfortable crowd. The world of Hyena refuses to spoon feed predictability because to do so would obfuscate the film’s organic emphasis on the functional yet corrupt whole, above and beyond the importance of agents caught in its web.