Tony Benson lives alone in a flat on a Dalston council estate tower block, a place that feels as crowded with silence as it is with memories. He fills his days with a careful ritual: a deep, almost passionate affection for 1980s violent action movies, a habit that shapes how he sees the world. He wanders the streets of London in a slow, aimless crawl, trying—often in vain—to connect with other people. He speaks with difficulty, his social anxiety turning even simple conversations into a small, brittle performance. For over twenty years, unemployment and state benefits have kept him tucked away from the usual rhythms of ordinary life, making him a quiet anomaly in a city that moves on without him.
The true nature of his inner life is eventually revealed: Tony is a serial killer. He ambushes men he encounters by chance, pulling them into a dark routine that begins as unsettling attempts at conversation and quickly spirals into violence. In one brutal sequence, he invites two drug addicts back to his home to smoke heroin, and the encounter ends with the suffocation of one man using a plastic bag while the other is confined in a cupboard before being released, under the hollow belief that fear will keep him from going to the authorities. The pattern repeats with a chilling clinical precision, each act performed with a disturbing blend of detachment and ritual.
Visitors to his home, when they occur, leave with a pungent reminder of the place’s decay—the unmistakable smell that Tony blames on clogged drains but which tells a far darker tale of what lies behind the walls. He encounters others at gay bars, bringing them back to his flat, where the normal boundaries of consent and desire dissolve into murder. He mirrors a disturbing historical figure in his method, drawing a line from fascination to violence that he cannot or will not cross back. There are times when his encounters veer toward vulnerability, as when a prostitute at a brothel dismisses him after a disappointing exchange—he offers only £5 for a cuddle and cannot sustain a conversation, and the moment passes, leaving him more isolated and misunderstood than ever.
The aftermath of his crimes is as meticulously hidden as the crimes themselves. He dismembers his victims in the kitchen, ending their lives with a cold practicality and then bagging their torsos and organs to dispose of them in the River Thames and the city’s canals. He drags the bodies out from their hiding places around the flat, placing them on the couch as if they were simply tired companions who will not wake. A rotting corpse remains in his bed, a grim symbol of a life lived in close, suffocating proximity to death, and he moves the bodies around as if rearranging furniture, ensuring they stay out of sight only as long as possible.
Suspicion eventually falls on him. A violent, volatile drunk becomes a relentless foe, harassing Tony with insults and aggression as he searches for a missing boy who is seen as Tony’s potential link to the disappearance. The harassment is physical as much as it is verbal, with shoves, grabs, and spit, and it marks Tony as a likely culprit in the eyes of the neighborhood. A police detective arrives to question him, a tense confrontation that holds the possibility of exposure in the air. The moment of danger intensifies when the detective’s inquiry is interrupted by a phone call just as Tony eyes a sharp potato peeler, a tool that could be pressed into violent use at a dangerous moment.
In the end, the missing boy is found, and the neighborhood breathes a relieved sigh as the boy is returned home. The moment absolves Tony, at least in the eyes of the community, who rally outside to applaud the safe return. From a window, Tony watches the celebrations without joining them, a quiet, unsettling presence in a city that continues to spin around him. The film closes with Tony strolling through London once more, unfettered by the suspicion that once shadowed him, free to pursue his murderous impulses again as if nothing had happened.
The story remains a stark, unflinching look at loneliness, the brittleness of social interaction, and the way a life can slide from ordinary routine into something utterly monstrous. It is a meditation on how a person can blend into the urban landscape while hiding a brutal, hidden truth, and it leaves the audience with a chilling image of a city that continues to turn a blind eye to the darkness living just beneath the surface.
