#hello destroyer

Overall: It would be a gross oversimplification to say that Kevan Funk’s Hello Destroyer is a film about violence, much as it would be a gross oversimplification to say that it’s a film about hockey. Yes, the film follows Tyson Burr (Jared Abrahamson), a professional hockey enforcer who gets dropped from his team after hitting an opposing player so hard he shattered one of his vertebrae and hemorrhaged his brain. Hello Destroyer is a film about Canada, specifically the institutionalized forms of toxic masculinity suffocating so many of its young men. As Funk explained in an interview with the Toronto Star:

“The hockey part is like a red herring or a misnomer…the only reason it’s about hockey is that I needed a big cultural institution at the centre of this film…if I set it in the U.S., it would probably be the military. But I did want to make a film that was aggressively and expressively Canadian.”

Through Hello Destroyer, Funk seeks to examine if not exorcise the forces that first controlled and then destroyed Tyson’s life. As with Ashley McKenzie’s Werewolf—another film which sought to define a Canadian cinematic identity and debuted alongside Hello Destroyer at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival—there might only be 3-5 pages of “plot” in the entire thing. Instead Funk dives into the internal emotional life of its characters through measured introspection, quiet character moments, and deliberate slowness. As I’m always eager to point out, “slowness” doesn’t always equal “tedious.” And though popcorn audiences used to blockbuster fare may find Hello Destroyer interminable, there isn’t a wasted shot, scene, or edit in the entire film. A master class in tone and pacing, Hello Destroyer is a mood piece which counter-intuitively gets it point across more successfully than a big-budget award-bait “message film.”

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Hello Destroyer (2016)

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Hello Destroyer, Directed by Kevan Funk