Kritiken

The window dressing might scream of flamboyant, sensationalized sexual excess, but the success of Dogs Don’t Wear Pants lies in its genuine open mindedness to sexuality which underscores its thoughtfulness, sensitivity, and humanity.

Set in the twilight world of BDSM sex, this darkly comic Scandi-Baltic co-production is more than just an exercise in cheap titillation, through it ultimately jumps the shark from subtle psychodrama to lurid melodrama.

Yes, there are moments of squirm-inducing extreme cinema, including a fingernail scene that recalls Jeff Goldblum’s squishy demise in The Fly, and a home dentistry sequence that makes Marathon Man seem very safe indeed. But the latter of these is punctuated with perfectly timed moments of laughter – an interpersonal intimacy that is the film’s true key register.

[T]his bondage-themed love story is not profoundly moronic. It is a serious, sometimes funny, occasionally disturbing and eventually joyful (a closing club-set scene is punch-the-air good) meditation on grief, loss and the healing power whips and chains.

It is in danger of substituting a new monogamous normality. But not before a great deal of alarming and intriguing provocation.

Though the film’s themes are serious, there is also much deadpan humour.

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants stands out as a rare fiction film to not sensationalise, pathologise or mock kink and those who participate in such activities. It is a sex-positive narrative through and through.

Dogs doesn’t pull its punches — the S&M is wince-worthy, especially in a pliers/teeth interface — but it has different colours too: dry wit, shards of tenderness and a worldview that surprisingly reframes the kinkiest, degrading acts as not only commonplace but restorative.

Finnish maverick J-P Valkeapää’s third film has everything: a terrific title, a death in the family, a time jump, teenage angst, adult angst, lousy parenting, hallucinations, remorse, guilt, a dog eating human discards and a whole lot of BDSM.

Gradually carving out a tender, conflicted misfit romance from lurid beginnings, and eventually finding joy in some very dark corners, Finnish writer-director Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää maintains a peculiar tonal balance to the end of his irresistibly titled third feature.

An engrossing and darkly comic rumination on mourning dwelling into a man’s grief through the least likely —and in hindsight, best-suited—prism possible: BDSM.

Fifty Shades Of Gray has nothing on this expedition to the dark side of the sexual psyches of two people with, shall we say, niche interests. But for a film which deals with watersports and recreational dental trauma among other things, it is, with the exception of a couple of scenes, curiously non-confrontational.