The eponymous Tony (an astonishingly good Peter Ferdinando) lives in a depressing old bloke’s flat in an equally depressing London suburb. He looks like somebody’s downbeat, if basically harmless, dad. He has been unemployed for 20 odd years, and the most encouragement he gets from the local job centre is “You’re actually costing the tax payer money - you could be a tax payer”. He wears a buttoned-down shirt tucked into trousers and his too-big glasses and moustache look somehow ill at ease with his skinny frame.

   This mild-mannered, lonely figure lives off beans on toast and orange squash. He’s unfailingly polite and friendly to strangers, though his obvious social awkwardness helps us to understand why he has no real friends. He loves 80’s action movies (on video), citing ENEMY TERRITORY and HIDER IN THE HOUSE as favorites, and he routinely quotes from FIRST BLOOD. He is invisible in society at large, other than having a tendency to stare at others, which sometimes gets him threatened and sworn at. He sleeps with decaying corpses of people he has recently killed a la Jeffrey Dahmer.

   This modest British movie is a kitchen sink drama with a severed head in the kitchen sink. It’s as authentic as a serial killer movie could seemingly be, with obvious parallels to the more visceral HENRY PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (both have depressingly unresolved endings, with Tony’s crimes remaining unnoticed as we leave him still walking alone on the streets of London). The decision to play down his murders (there is barely any blood, and only suggested brutality) results in a compelling, haunting study of a sympathetic misfit who just happens to kill people.

   Ferdinando’s extraordinary, unmannered performance gives us the only truly sympathetic character in the movie. The everyday hostility of a typical modern city estate is beautifully captured as Tony gets routinely bullied - physically and otherwise - by everyone from the coppers to Department of Work & Pensions personnel without actually saying or doing anything offensive. His victims - junkies, a TV license inspector, a whorish gay guy he picks up from a club - are deliberately disposable, even deserving of their fates.

   Pared down, non-exploitative and superbly acted, the movie is as poignant as it is uncomfortably credible, with a great deal of gallows humor : notably a tragic-comic episode with a hooker with whom Tony just wants a cuddle for £5. The vivid location shooting enhances the isolation of this ordinary bloke with an extraordinary secret, while indie band The The provide a suitably low key but melancholic theme for Tony.