Gerard Johnson’s 2009 indie film Tony is about a meek Englishman living alone in a flat on a council housing estate and harbouring dark secrets. This unassuming man comes off initially as a depressing loner, whose life revolves around a pint and crisps at the pub every afternoon, movies on VHS at home all day, and little to nothing else. He’s the type of man most people would recognize — an everyday type, the sort of man you wouldn’t think about twice. In this way, he’s exactly like the real person on whom his character is loosely based: Scottish serial killer Dennis Nilsen.
Tony isn’t wholesale fictionalization of Nilsen’s crimes. On the contrary, the eponymous character is a version of Nilsen. Tony (played by Peter Ferdinando) is very different from the actual killer. At times, he’s also a mirror image. Johnson uses similarities between the two to create a story focusing less on the crimes themselves and becoming more a character study of the dark despair in human loneliness. The screenplay never aims to sympathize with the murderer. What it does is dispel the idea of the inhuman monster, reminding its audience that even the most brutal of killers are, for better or worse, human. Tony’s not a likeable character, neither was Nilsen a likeable human being— their likability isn’t the point. Nilsen is written about as a psychopath, which doesn’t wholly explain him. His deep sense of loneliness itself was symptomatic of an ability to feel. Johnson explores this aspect of Nilsen through the character of Tony by thrusting his audience headlong into the fictional man’s bleak and tedious existence.
The tale of Dennis Nilsen is as gruesome as it is depressing. Serial killers aren’t deserving of sympathy. This doesn’t change the fact some of them have lived sad lives. Nilsen’s murders were inexcusable. Nevertheless, the word psychopath can’t fully describe the man. His murders were fuelled by a devastating loneliness. Similar to Jeffrey Dahmer’s desire for a docile lover, Nilsen was terrified by the thought of being left by his, and it ultimately drove him to kill. After he murdered his victims, he often kept them in his home for various lengths of time and engaged in domestic activities with their lifeless bodies: eating at the dinner table, watching television, sleeping in bed, and, occasionally, sexual intercourse.
A huge part of Johnson’s screenplay revolves around the quiet nature of Tony. Just like Nilsen, Tony’s a mild mannered man, and the people around him would never have guessed he was a killer. Until the day Nilsen was implicated for murder there were no assumptions he was chopping men to bits and dumping them down the toilet. Johnson takes the viewer nearly 20 minutes in before revealing his main character’s true nature. Prior to that – if you didn’t read anything about the film’s plot beforehand – the fact Tony’s a serial killer, who keeps several bodies in his apartment at the one time, comes as a relative surprise. In this way, Johnson likens his character to Nilsen even by how he allows the story to unfold for his viewers, replicating the real feeling people must have experienced after discovering their neighbour was a serial killer.
When we first encounter Tony after the opening shots of him wandering a lower class area of London, he’s desperately seeking human interaction. He talks away to a man selling bootleg DVDs, getting no response, and it’s obvious he only wants to talk to somebody. This becomes a recurring theme with Tony. He only relates to the world through entertainment, such as the VHS tapes of old 1980s action movies he watches at home. He quotes First Blood to one of his soon-to-be victims. In another scene, Tony invites a pair of junkies back to his house after bumping into them at a telephone booth. All he can talk about is movies, to the point they start teasing him. This obsession with VHS tapes is indicative of the social isolation which has shaped Tony. Early on he nearly gets beaten by an angry man in a pub because he watches the man and his wife arguing as if it were The Jerry Springer Show. Tony doesn’t know how to connect to normal people. His life consists of friendship with the characters of movies and television. The desperation leads to murder, which is where Tony has the most in common with Nilsen.
Loneliness played such a significant part in Nilsen’s crimes. He was a gay man, though had unresolved issues with his own sexual preference. This uncomfortable feeling left Nilsen conflicted. He wanted a partner, yet the men he found frightened him due to an inability to accept his own homosexuality. His psychology warped him to homicide, believing he could preserve happiness with another man by killing him and living with the corpse. Nilsen didn’t even particularly want sex with men. He sought human contact, preferring to cuddle. During one scene, Tony’s fine being cuddled by a man, only to freak out when the man comes on strong asking: “Should we fuck?”
The desperate loneliness of Nilsen led to a fascination with death. As a boy, he was lied to when his grandfather, whom he was incredibly close to, eventually passed away. His mother said his grandfather was only sleeping, so a young Dennis assumed at some point the man would wake up. When this never happened, the boy was devastated, and this began his lifelong obsession with death. Nilsen was so obsessed he would actually pretend to be dead in order to achieve sexual gratification by himself. He would lie in bed, still, and look in the mirror, imagining himself as the body in a casket just like when he saw his grandfather as a boy. Even stranger, Nilsen took to putting on makeup by himself at home – usually white powder makeup on his face and body to, in his words, erase the living colour – and pretended to be a corpse. These subtle rituals are the epitome of loneliness. Nilsen didn’t only want to keep dead partners around, he essentially wanted to be dead himself. There’s a scene in the film where Tony does the same, as he prepares to kill the two junkies. He comes into the room with streaks of white makeup down his face. It’s not only a scene showing the influence of the real Nilsen, it’s a terrifying moment that comes out of nowhere.
Tony further displays the same post mortem behaviour with his victims as Nilsen did, keeping a clearly rotting body in bed with him. Sometimes he has several of them in the room, depicted in a scene where Tony has two dead men sitting on the couch watching television with him. He wakes up next to another body and asks if the man wants a cup of tea. This was how Nilsen operated, doing so until the smell of decomposition from the bodies was too unbearable, after which he’d get drunk and dispose of them. For his early murders, Nilsen stowed bodies under his floorboards and then burned them in a bonfire behind his house. Like Tony, he later wound up in an upstairs flat necessitating a new method of disposal. There are several scenes of Tony bleeding and washing bodies in a bathtub, then cutting up the smaller parts and organs in a sink. He disposes of the smallest remains by taking them in little plastic bags down to the river and dumping them. This ritual is what Nilsen did once he moved to his upstairs flat, no longer having access to a backyard and no option of putting bodies under the floorboards anymore.
Although Tony isn’t caught at the end of the film, his story isn’t over. A brief mention during an earlier scene, after he picks up a man at a gay bar, is suggestive of a possible future end to his murders not unlike the arrest of Nilsen. As they enter his apartment the man smells something strange and Tony says it’s the drains, mentioning the council’s supposed to come check them. This is a direct reference to the actual events that brought Nilsen’s killings to an end. The real life Nilsen dumped too much dead human flesh and bone down his toilet and clogged the drains in his apartment building. He was caught once they were cleaned and human remains were found. Long before this revelation, Nilsen was actually reported to police on a couple of occasions, such as when he tried strangling a student from Hong Kong who escaped his clutches, though later decided not to pursue charges. These near misses are reflected in the film by Tony just barely dodging the suspicion of a cop who falsely believes he might have abducted a local kid— just as the cop’s about to search the apartment, the boy turns up fine elsewhere. Afterwards, the final scene depicts Tony wandering the streets of London again, this time the more tourist side of London, mirroring the opening shots where he walked the streets of a lower class neighbourhood. He might have gotten away, like Nilsen did a couple times, but the suggestion is, someday, the law will catch up with him down the line.
Where Tony and Nilsen diverge is in little details. While the real serial killer was regarded as a fairly intelligent person, his fictional counterpart is not. Tony’s not presented as a man with mental disabilities, he’s suggested as having a traumatic past. Nilsen isn’t known to have experienced any physical or sexual abuse as a child. However, one scene in the film subtly leans towards abuse in Tony’s childhood. While cleaning one of his messy murders in the bathroom, Tony hears the voice of his father. The voice leads us to believe there was emotional, physical, or sexual abuse committed against Tony as a boy. Whatever the differences between Tony and Nilsen, the results are the same. Both are isolated and lonely. Johnson includes enough difference to make his character not an exact copy of his real life model. The fact Johnson writes Tony as having a traumatic childhood is only significant insofar as it’s a noticeable difference. This doesn’t alter the core issues affecting both him and Nilsen, it merely distinguishes real life from fiction. In loose fictionalizations of real stories, facts and truth are not so much what matters, taken over by the importance of themes. This allows Johnson a degree of freedom from the verified facts of the actual serial killer’s life, and a space in which he can fully explore Tony’s loneliness without being shackled to the truth.
Johnson’s film is as visceral and unsettling as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) in its raw realism, but for wholly different reasons. Most movies based on serial killers, fictionalized or not, don’t try to make us sympathize with the killers themselves. Because of the fictionalization, Tony puts the viewer in a place to examine the killer as more of a human without falling into the typical view of a killer as inhuman. Nobody wants to watch a film where they’re asked to sympathize with Dennis Nilsen or any other murderer. It’s easier to digest a character study about someone like Tony, where the real life victims need not be disrespected by the viewer being asked to commiserate with the person who butchered them. That’s not to say everyone will see the character in that way. All the same, the purpose of Johnson telling this story is to look at the depths of human loneliness and how those depths can irreparably warp a person’s psyche. The majority of psychopaths murder for reasons connected to rage: Ted Bundy killed women out of sheer hatred, the Green River Killer hated the prostitutes he murdered, Charles Ng and Leonard Lake brutally taunted and tortured women before they met their deaths, and on goes the list of misery. With so-called psychopaths, such as Nilsen or his fictional counterpart, the reasons are less about anger and more connected to a deep-seated sadness. The reason Bundy, Ridgway, and others like them unnerve us is because most of us will never be capable of comprehending their levels of anger. In the same vein, Nilsen and the fictional Tony unnerve us because, likewise, most will never understand the abyssal sadness they felt to transform them into cold blooded killers.
 fictionalizes the crimes of serial killer Dennis Nilsen with a palpable sense of sadness.){kind=link}