Dog: Review

9th November 2024

Dog: Review. By Simon Thompson.

Writer/director Ben Tan’s short film Dog, is a high contrast black and white assault on the senses in the vein of movies such as La Haine or Man Bites Dog. If were to describe Dog in the most lift pitch way possible, I would say that it’s the end result of what would happen if Richard Linklater were born in Paris instead of Houston and made a movie as a part of the cinema du look movement.

The plot of Dog follows Summer (Alexis Felix), a 19 year old girl forced by her mother to take her blind younger sister Lex (Nastasia Koulich) to a rave with her. When the pair decide to take a break from the rave and get some fresh air, a guy clearly drugged out of his mind, starts flirting with Lex and the night ends up going in an increasingly sinister direction.

Tan uses an intimate and claustrophobic shooting style, to place the audience into the world of his characters more effectively, again in a very similar way to La Haine but also Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law and Luc Besson’s Subway. What Dog also has in common with those movies is that it places societal outsiders at the forefront of the action, which when combined with Tan’s compact cinematography, creates a potent visual effect.

The acting in Dog is befittingly naturalistic and understated, with the performances of the two leads Alexis Fleck and Nastasia Koulich, in particular, being completely believable in their roles as a pair of siblings. In the wrong hands this short could have turned into a pathetically memable after school PSHE special, but thanks to Tan’s sparse script the characters depicted act and feel like real teenagers on a night out.

Dog is an excellent short film which at a tight 13 minutes is absolutely worth watching. In a world where filmmakers have seemingly forgotten the lesson of less is more, it’s absolutely refreshing to watch something which tells a complete story in a very short amount of time. If you’re a fan of Jim Jarmusch’s early work, Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish or cinema du look movies you will more likely than not find Tan’s short to be a more than enjoyable viewing experience.

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