Tony (2010)

With its low key visuals unblinkingly recording the horror and a menacing pared-down score, Tony invites deserved comparisons with John McNaughton's classic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.  

There is also a touch of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle in its madman who collects a scrapbook of phonebox call-girl cards and whose attempts at striking up conversations with passers-by are squirmingly uncomfortable.

But, Tony (Ferdinando, astonishing in what should be a breakout performance) lacks Henry's muscled charisma or Travis' diary entry eloquence, being loosely based on Britain's own 1980s loon Dennis Nilsen, a man who literally killed for company.

With a portable TV and collection of trash 80s action movies (on VHS, technology has passed him by) his most constant companions, mates come in the form of junkies Tony joins for a heroin run and subsequent smoking session in his flat (where everyone complains about the smell) or men picked up at the local gay bar.

With slicked-down hair, unfashionable clipped moustache, dirty fingernails and outsized glasses, Tony is also the target of a local thug whose kid has disappeared and who doesn't realise this buttoned-down basket case is actually more lethally threatening to adults than kids.

Like Henry... the police barely get a look-in, Ferdinando's terrifyingly banal psycho so used to getting away with murder he even lets one (criminal) near-victim go.

Writer/director Johnson hold back on the violence, but when it arrives, sudden and matter-of-fact, it's genuinely unnerving.  The greater horror however lies in the glimpses of Tony's home-life, flanked by two corpses on the settee, introducing one to the other, or waking up beside a decomposing body with a
good-natured "Good morning".

Johnson also creates a vision of London's underclass, populated by pasty-faced hoodies and aggressive wife-beaters, so hellish it will have Guardian readers turning Daily Mail.

Undeniably bleak, but blood-blackly funny and disturbing rather than depressing, this puts Johnson in the Shane Meadows league, and with Ferdinando the director may also have his own ready-made Paddy Considine. 

Here's hoping the pair's follow-up is another film as exciting as this.

Rob Daniel