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Tyrannosaur is a bleak film. Perhaps the bleakest you will ever see. This is a crushingly depressing story about abuse, trauma, and the recurrent failure to overcome both. Well-drawn characters are played with staggeringly fine-tuned acting. Peter Mullan and Olivia Colman give two world-class lead performances, and Eddie Marsan is absolutely contemptible in a brief but impactful supporting role. This is truly an actor’s showcase, as one may expect with an actor as talented as Paddy Considine in the director’s chair.
I will be covering elements from all points in the film throughout this essay, so consider this your spoiler warning. If you want to cry and be horribly depressed by an expertly acted drama, then watch Tyrannosaur.
One of the most highly-acclaimed books on screenwriting is Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. Setting aside whether or not the advice in the book is any good, the titular mechanism of the book is to provide your protagonist with a figurative “save the cat” moment early on in the film; have your protagonist do something commendable, selfless, or heroic near the start of a film in order to make them a likable protagonist that audiences will want to root for. A great many films utilize this tactic, whether on the advice of this book or just out of common sense for…
