Movie Review: 'Dogs' From Director Bogdan Mirica

Dogs found fame at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival but is only finding an American release now via Dekanalog. This crime thriller about an outsider who comes to a small village following the death of his Uncle only to find trouble with his Uncle’s former gang of violent criminals is a stark and striking first feature from director Bogdan Mirca. Dogs is unrelentingly sparse and dry but the visceral impact of the action is as great as any big budget American thriller

Roman (Dragos Bucar) would rather be anywhere else than in this remote, barren, farmland that once belonged to his late Uncle. With his Uncle’s death however, the home and the property around it are now his and he must decide what to do with it. He’s advised by an old friend of his Uncle to just leave it as it is, untouched and untended. But Roman would prefer to sell the property before he leaves this place behind for good.

While staying in his Uncle’s cottage, Roman sees men coming and going late at night on the property. He investigates but finds nothing. Later, when Roman has his real estate agent friend, Voicu (Emillan Oprea) over to discuss the sale of the property, the men in the distance return and Voicu grabs a shotgun and invites Roman to follow him in investigating what these men are doing on the property.

In a seemingly separate story, the local Police Captain, Hogas (Gheorge Visu), is visited by a local fisherman who has made a gruesome discovery. While fishing on a scum covered, stagnant lake, the fisherman’s dog found a human foot. No other body parts are found, just the severed foot which appears to have been chewed off by some manner of animal, a dog or boar is suspected.

In attempting to locate the owner of this severed appendage, following a striking and gross scene of the chief at his dinner table, thankfully alone, separating the foot from first a waterlogged tennis shoe and sock. The scene is perfectly in keeping with the style and tone of the movie which portrays life in this remote place as being very, very different from any reality recognized by most people.

The Chief’s investigation leads him to Roman, being the only outsider in this cloistered enclave, the Chief first wanted to make sure that Roman wasn't the person formerly attached to this appendage. The discovery of the foot comes within a day of Voicu’s visit to the property and now Voicu and the vehicle that he borrowed from Roman, are nowhere to be found. Roman feigns confidence that his friend will turn up but it’s just a front.

The Chief, on the other hand, though he doesn’t say it, knows that this is likely Voicu and he believes that he knows how it happened. Roman’s Uncle employed a group of men who live on the property in a far off corner. These men, led by Samir (Vlad Ivanov), have long been a small criminal gang who either paid or intimidated people to look the other way on their various crimes involving drugs and murder.

If Roman sells the property they would lose their small empire and the psychopathic Samir is determined to not let the sale happen. With the character of Samir, director Bogdan Mirica takes an interesting tact. Rather than spend time building the character of Samir into a menace, he keeps Samir in the background until after the middle of the second act. We only get a sense of his menace from a scene in which the Chief attempts to recruit one of Samir’s men to rat him out. The legend building is effective.

Vlad Ivanov is a smart choice for the villain of Dogs. He looks like a hard man, a man of the land, proud and brutal. His face never seems to change from a harsh grimace that does little to mask his malevolent nature. He’s a malignant presence, narcissistic and overbearing. Some of that comes from the aforementioned legend building but even more comes from Ivanov’s seering performance as a man who appears only a moment away from violence in any given setting.

Dogs has little to no musical score. Instead moments of grim silence are punctured regularly by the harsh, angry, and painful barks of Roman’s Uncle’s dog, named Polizia. The mostly feral dog lives on the farm and is tolerated by Roman but there is no friendship or kinship between the two. The dog barks throughout the night and is how Roman is introduced to what is happening on his property. The barking of Polizia cuts through the silence with a harsh and angry energy as unrelenting as the rest of Dogs.

Dogs is not a movie for all audiences. The lengthy silence, the barking dogs, the vast darkness of Dogs will likely be off-putting to a mainstream audience. For me, however, I was riveted from beginning to end. Dogs is eerie and atmospheric, it’s slow paced but deliberate. Director Bogdan Mirica directs with purpose and style, he allows scenes to linger in just the right ways and drops in big dramatic moments as needed. It’s a masterful bit of direction.

Dogs arrives in theaters on September 10th, 2021, both in regular theatrical distribution as well as in virtual screenings. Find out how to see Dogs by going to Dekanalog.com.