Since I started watching films more seriously, there is a temptation to eagerly latch on to anything exotic and treat it as if it were an artistic work. I read about this on Broken Forum, noted that it was shown the the Cannes Film Festival and has a suitably high Rotten Tomatoes. I knew nothing else about it other than that it was about dogs but it seemed like a respectably artistic film. Of course, the truth is that just because it was made in what is to us exotic Hungary doesn’t automatically mean that it’s good.

Young teenager Lili and her dog Hagen are sent to live with her father Dániel when her mother goes on a three-month trip to Australia. The inclusion of the dog comes as a surprise to Dániel who is dismayed by the closeness that Lili has with what he sees as a mere mutt. After a neighbor’s complaint leads to a visit from animal services, Dániel abandons Hagen by the roadside and Lili is powerless to do anything about it. Wandering the streets as a stray Hagen befriends other dogs and escapes dog catchers from animal services. Eventually he is still caught and sold to a man who specializes in training dogs for a dog fighting ring. Starved, beaten and fed drugs, he is transformed from his previously docile self to become a ruthless beast. In the ring, he manages to kill the first dog he is set to fight but being seemingly remorseful afterwards is able to run away. Meanwhile after fruitlessly searching for Hagen on the streets, Lili appears to fall into a cycle of bad behavior, attending parties with drugs and alcohol.

It’s pretty evident that this isn’t meant to be a realistic film early on when Hagen works together with a smaller dog to evade humans who mean them harm but the film really drops any pretence at this being even a vaguely plausible scenario towards the end. It’s not much of a giveaway to say that it involves a large group of dogs escaping from a shelter that manages to somehow lockdown an entire city. At the same time, this film sits in a weird place, tonally speaking. You’d normally expect films featuring unrealistically smart and sympathetic animals to be family friendly affairs but the level of brutality shown here with horribly abused dogs and dogs killed is very much inappropriate viewing for children. However adorable Hagen is at the beginning of the film, by its end he is such a monster even a person who likes dogs as much as I do is horrified by the thought of him becoming just an ordinary family pet again.

I suppose a more apt comparison is the Planet of the Apes reboot except that there’s no attempt to explain why the dogs are so unusually intelligent and well organized and that the more commercial films don’t pretend to be anything other than action movies. Between the bit about Dániel’s work in an abattoir and  Lili’s troubles at her music school and with boys, there’s also a lot of mixed messaging. Then there’s the genre shifting as well as the film becomes straight out horror towards the end with dogs capable of stalking humans. One constant that emerges from this may be that violence against humans is justified due to how cruel to other animals we as a species which is original but rather kooky. To me as a dog lover the depiction of the shelter here actually seems rather humane and reasonable so it’s hard to sympathize with dogs killing the shelter’s workers.

The best thing that can be said about this film is that it defies every expectation. It’s also well shot with a cinematographic style that is similar to other European independent films. Content-wise however it is a real mess and there is little reason to watch it. If the director wanted to speak up against dog fighting rings he would have been better off making a documentary instead.