Black Dog Movie Review

The top prize went to Dark Cloud by director Guan Hu (The Eight Hundred, Mr Six); a darkly comic thriller about a taxi driver and released convict entangled in underworld politics, and starring the Canadian-Taiwanese actor Eddie Peng.

Chinese director Guan Hu’s stylish new feature Black Dog opens in familiar mode: a former convict named Lang (Eddie Peng) has spent a decade in jail. Now, upon his release, he is attempting to re-enter normal life in his native, tiny city on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in Northwest China. But some old devils rear their heads.

If you expect the story to resemble any number of prefab B-movies – or even the scenario of the Sylvester Stallone miniseries Tulsa King (2022) – you need to be told that Black Dog is, quite simply, not that kind of film. For one thing, who is the titular black dog? In any case, it’s not the total loser of a protagonist – a man who rarely speaks more than a few words of dialogue to any person throughout the entire film (including to his own dad) as he tries to make himself comfortable in a town that does not want him – or to the stray black greyhound he meets in town, with whom he eventually bonds.

Black Dog is no Man’s Best Friend movie, either – even if Lang and his rabid mixed mutt fly like Huck Finn in the middle of the film’s runaway plot. An urban fantasia of sleazy violent decay and dog craziness that starts with a startling scene of dogs overturning a bus on a desert highway and gets wilder and weirder, Guan’s strangely deadpan thriller is really a redemption story, taking unexpected detours into and around pitfalls as its down-and-outher struggles toward rehab.

The director’s past credits do not augur well, including rock-em sock-em action vehicles such as Mr Six (2015) and The Eight Hundred (2021), which could not be more unlike the Black Dog’s oddball tone and arthouse stylistics that seem to come from a crossbreeding of the Coens’ No Country For Old Men (2007) and recent Chinese noirs such as The Wild Goose Lake (2019) by Diao Yinan. There’s some bloodshed – but not at all graphic. There’s certainly some animal cruelty. But largely this is a movie about a very strange place and time, where men and dogs leave bloody paw prints in the leechy, smoke-smeared ground, seemingly for all eternity, in a desolate city on the verge of state-sponsored bulldozing.

Set over the summer of 2008, the months before the Beijing Summer Olympics, the main action kicks off with Lang – pale, morose, shaved-headed – emerging from the wreckage of the bus in which he was first injured only to walk into town, where he returns to his childhood home. His father has finally given in to eviction and moved out to live at the town’s zoo, while a triad leader called Butcher Hu (Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke plays a gangster for the first time) is seeking revenge for ‘the crime’ that put Lang in prison for a decade, all of which is revealed much later in the film.

The only other buddy he makes on his return is a lanky greyhound he finds outside one of the many bombed-out shells that litter the city’s margins, doomed to demolition as part of a massive urban renewal programme that’s left much of the terrain occupied by gangs of growing pups. Guan slips a dog (or two) into almost every frame of his film, whether they’re watching from a distance by the action, strolling in the background, running through empty streets, or, in a standout stunt shot, smashing through a window.

Shot by the brilliant cinematographer Gao Weizhe in strikingly wide-frame compositions rendered grainy with dust and blanchéd with colour, Lang and his symbolic homeless dog (who never gets a proper name) are often lost in the great expanses of unpopulated city­scape and encircling desert, with sand blowing in from all sides, dogs running wild, other animals (snakes, tigers, macaques) wandering around – Mother Nature finally getting its licks in on the downtrodden dogtown settlement that no one in the rest of China is bothering to remember, while they get ready to roar their triumphs when the summer Olympics begin in August.

Lang makes up with his dad, and eventually deals with Butcher Hu – a real butcher who, for serious, specialises in local snake delicacies – but, more importantly, he takes the black dog home and gets her to stop limping. He does so at first because, panicked that the greyhound has given him the rabies, Lang wants to avoid fighting the smartest regiment of his life because he’s already pretty dumb; but then, slowly, his story with her becomes one of love at each painful, fleeting biting moment. Man and hound get to know each other. They help each other out in special ways that take care of the other.

In Hollywood, it seems like a canine-centric drama is a dime a dozen – the latest US blockbuster starring Mark Wahlberg is Arthur the King, but an international subgenre of other action-dramas and thrillers takes a more artistic and less empathetic approach to the canine. Guan’s dreamy and erotic new film belongs to the latter breed, following in the pawsteps of films to showcase at the Cannes festival in recent years, including last year’s Palme d’Or and Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall, where furry fear or friendship becomes a key plot point.

Black Dog may not have walked off with Cannes’ ironic Palme Dog prize for films of that ilk (it went to the French actress-director Laëtitia Dosch’s Dog on Trial), but it did win an equally well-earned Prix Un Certain Regard — no small feat in a sidebar many felt this year served up the most interesting writings of the week. That should give Guan’s latest some mojo to slip past the borders of China, where he’s already proven himself the czar of major commercial fare (The Eight Hundred grossed a jaw-dropping $460 million), but who now has shown he can make something off-kilter and, in a strange way, compelling.