The title of Paul Holbrook’s latest short film is polysemic. Tor Lewa, or تور لیوهوه, is the Pashto for ‘Black Wolf’, alluding not just to the ferocious canine monster that dogs protagonist Billy (Frank C. Keogh, also the film’s co-writer) when he is otherwise alone on the streets of Bristol at night, but also to the ‘black dog’ of depression that has driven Billy to alcoholism and antisocial behaviour. There may be something lycanthropic about this terrifying predatory creature that appears under a full moon and is played by a man in a costume (George Reid), but really it is Billy who has undergone a monstrous metamorphosis, no longer recognisable, even to his concerned, overwhelmed mother Mary (Lorraine Perez). “That’s who you should be, that’s my boy,” Mary says, pointing at the framed photograph on her council flat’s wall showing a much younger, fresh-faced Billy dressed up in suit and tie for his school leaving, and full of promise. Billy responds by smashing the picture with his fist, in a violent outburst that captures impulses that are essentially self-destructive.
“He sees things, things that ain’t real, monsters,” the desperate Mary will tell counsellor Joanne (Anna Acton) of Billy, yet Joanne, who intimately understands the workings of Billy’s condition, will insist, “What he’s fighting, the monster, is real.” For here the tropes of a werewolf movie intersect with the delirious hallucinations of Billy, becoming a harrowingly vivid, intradiegetic metaphor for a very particular kind of creeping mental illness. Others may not see the black wolf as Billy does (and we do), but it embodies all his suffering, and dominates his headspace, until he can no longer see anything else. And as a man with access to a firearm, unhinged, emotionally fragile Billy is also locked and loaded, a danger to himself and others just waiting to be triggered.
Near the beginning of Tor Lewa, there is a careful match cut between Billy holding up the retrieved revolver, and then bringing to his mouth not the gun (as Ben Williams-Butt’s fluid edit has led us to expect), but the bottle of spirits that Billy also carries. Both are of course equally images of suicide, of the end to which Billy is being propelled by his own demons. Billy feels isolated and abandoned, and cannot see that Mary, Joanne and bartender John (Matt Bardock) have his back and are looking out for his best interests in impossible circumstances. The film’s closing section preaches the need for such support and solidarity, and for the hope that can survive even in extremis – and this sequence also slyly plays upon our own hope against all odds. Yet the film is mature enough also to show, beyond all the wish-fulfilment fantasy, a real underlying horror that can tear people’s lives apart.
strap: Paul Holbrook’s werewolf-inflected short film stalks a damaged alcoholic down the dark tunnel of despair
© Anton Bitel
