Directed by David Ayer and written by Cameron Alexander, Heart of the Beast can be quite an emotional film for people like me who genuinely believe in the emotional bond between dogs and humans. I have a memory from my childhood that I have never forgotten. I had a Dobermann that I looked after in our backyard. One day, while I was cleaning the inside of his kennel, I must have gotten distracted for a moment and accidentally untied his leash. He immediately took off running at full speed and escaped from the yard. I ran after him, but he was so fast that he disappeared from sight. I spent hours looking for him. I had already started to think that he would never come back. When I woke up the next morning, however, I found him inside his kennel. He was wagging his tail while I was petting his head. And yet, somehow, we were both jumping around with excitement.
When I thought about why he had come back, I probably assumed that he had simply found nowhere else to go or that he had gotten hungry. But as I grew older, I realized that he actually knew exactly where his home was—well enough to disappear for hours, wander around without getting lost, and still find his way back. Maybe he simply wanted to go out for a little adventure, knowing that he would eventually return home.
I don’t think we should see dogs as separate from ourselves simply because they aren’t as intelligent as we are, can’t speak, or can’t use knives and forks. Dogs can possess more empathy, compassion, and loyalty than many humans. As I once angrily told an old friend after we had a falling-out: “I don’t need any friends. You can go too. My dog is enough for me.”
Heart of the Beast follows James, a former soldier who has withdrawn from society and lives in isolation because of the trauma he has experienced, and Odin, his dog and fellow former soldier, who lost one of his legs in combat. After a series of unfortunate events, the two struggle to survive in the wilderness. Aside from J.K. Simmons briefly appearing and then disappearing, the film focuses almost entirely on this duo, constantly showing us just how deep their loyalty and love for one another are despite every obstacle they encounter.
On the surface, Heart of the Beast looks like a mixture of Into the Wild and 127 Hours, melted together in the same pot. It doesn’t really say anything particularly new. But I don’t think it necessarily needs to. The story it tells is one of humanity’s oldest: a person who cannot find what they are looking for in other people finding the companionship they seek in a dog. And despite being a story that has been told countless times before, it somehow always manages to work.
The film certainly contains the familiar American military clichés about soldiers confronting the trauma they have carried for years, along with plenty of traditionally “masculine” elements. Even so, it is a film that generally looks at life from the right place and, more importantly, genuinely has a heart.
The last time I watched David Ayer was with A Working Man. It seems quite difficult to pull this man away from the action genre. But at least this film has considerably less action than his other movies, and definitely much more connection and emotion.
