Peter Ferdinando has offered ace supporting turns to Jack O’Connell in Starred-Up and Ben Wheatley’s coterie of Civil War malcontents in A Field In England. Hyena, a cop thriller set in the Big Smoke, gives him a long overdue turn in the spotlight. The film has a moody new poster to sell its wares. Gerard Johnson’s last film, Tony, saw Ferdinando playing a serial killer who did very nasty things to people before dumping them into the Thames. This time around he’s on the other side of the law. Well, supposedly. As Michael Logan, a police officer with a drug habit and the loosest sense of morality on the Met, he’s up against a bunch of Albanian gangsters even more crooked than he is. “An antihero for our times” is how the film bills him.
Stephen Graham slots in alongside him as a copper on the take, a slippery antihero for all the other times, with fellow Wheatley acolytes Neil Maskell and MyAnna Buring also populating this world of corruption and murk.
Written and directed by Johnson and produced by Stephen ‘Woolley on the Web’ Woolley, **Hyena **is shaping up to be punchy and amoral in the spirit of The Long Good Friday, Get Carter and Woolley’s own Mona Lisa. You can catch it when it stalks onto UK cinema screens on March 6.