Critics reviews

Funk willfully deviates from the expectations of a Canadian film about hockey, and the film is grueling by design, unflinching in its gaze of Tyson's descent.

The narrative works on a social level—via the commodification of (masculine) bodies, as well as a historical one—explored through the character of Eric, an ex-hockey player with a First Nations background. But it's in the sharp, observational rigor of Tyson's increasingly fraught situation that the film's tragic force resides. By the end, after everything has been stripped away, once the echoes of the national anthem have faded, there is only the immediacy of that closing passage.

Often framing its protagonist's close-cropped head from behind or in stark profile, Funk's camera has an almost Austrian ruthlessness—imagine a nation's national pastime treated like Benny's Video. Rather than a tightening-the-screws race to a crackup, Hello Destroyer is a patient and pensively compassionate observation of lost people rattling around within hypocritical systems, in and out of the ice rink.

Abrahamson's skillful physical acting as a mournful scapegoat is one important tool in the movie's arsenal; Benjamin Loeb's cinematography, which keeps splitting the screen into grids and prisms, is another. The severity of the filmmaking does get wearing at nearly two hours, but it's also perfectly in tune with the subject matter, and Funk exploits the predictability of Tyson's narrative to give this character study some tragic weight.