Critics reviews

After making a few little-seen, little-appreciated art films (including "Delta" and "Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project"), Hungarian auteur Kornel Mundruczo delivered a work of hard-hitting provocation and startling violence that suggested we may have a new (ahem) Peckinpaw on our hands.

Immediately after seeing Kornél Mundruczó's Budapest-set canine rebellion picture White God, I thought that I had merely seen a bad movie, though in the days afterwards it occurred to me that perhaps a sly political metaphor was at work in the film, and my opinion began to shift. To wit, I am now convinced that it is an utter and complete piece of irredeemable, self-important feculence.

Although the simple plot is articulated with great clarity, this is mainly a film of moments. And what moments! Mundruczó's and his cinematographer Marcell Rev shoot Lili and Hagen's story with a documentary-like immediacy, following much of the action with a handheld widescreen camera that's often placed at ground level, the better to show harsh urban landscapes through a dog's eyes.

Well-intentioned but deeply flawed, White God jettisons a nation's complex history of conquest and miscegenation—not to mention any tangible link to actual legislation or government action that would or might incite social protest—in order to craft an essentialist parable about how some breeds have fetched the short end of the stick.

White God is riddled with messages — though the surface message, "be kind to animals, or else," is more potent than any of this film's allegorical ones. Putting animals who stand for human groups together with real human characters confuses the issues. White God wants audiences to be moved because stray dogs are persecuted like homeless people. But viewers are prodded to despise the one actual street person in the movie for taking advantage of a dog.

The brutality of the training, which culminates with an ugly fight that's a frenzy of slamming bodies, ominous growls and bloodied muzzles, isn't for the weak of heart. But these scenes represent movie sleight of hand at its finest, as do the sequences of Hagen making like Jason Bourne while escaping pound workers, hurtling down alleys, darting around corners, racing across terraces and even bursting through an apartment window into the lap of its understandably surprised inhabitant.

If the canine rebellion—with unleashed dogs flooding the city's abandoned boulevards, leaping through the air, punching their human masters in the face with their own faces—comprised more than about ten minutes of its runtime, Mundruczó's Disney-grade screenwriting would ring less obvious. That the film is a parable for illegal immigration (a tectonic issue in contemporary Hungarian politics) can't excuse its heavy-handedness; in many ways, it makes it an even further-missed opportunity.

White God" has been compared to "The Birds," but there are also echoes of "Lassie Come Home" and even "Dirty Harry." Director Kornél Mundruczó goes big with allegory, violence, drama and sentiment, and the results are riveting.

The humans are out-acted by the dogs, who are emotionally compelling even when quietly watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon while waiting to be put down. At the climax, 250 pups storm the streets in a shot that recalls the rebooted Planet of the Apes. Amazingly, there's no CG. When the violence gets unbearable, take comfort in the troop of trainers on the sidelines who prove that, for now, man and beast still make a good team.

White God is a symphony of emotion, at once succeeding as drama, revenge, and adventure film, in chronicling Hagen's journey to rebellion. Mundruczó sets his moral tale against the backdrop of a mutating Eastern Europe, in which the tensions created by capitalist and nationalist tendencies reinforce the social divides.

DP Marcell Rev does a superb job of filming around the unwatchable, as well as directly on the enormous pack of racing animals that overwhelm Budapest without the benefit of CGI.

Kornél Mundruczó's fable of liberation and redemption is far less distinctive than its high-culture trappings might indicate, an amorphous allegory that's part canine spin on Hitchcock's The Birds, part art-house Benji, never moving past a basic conception of animals as adorable, attention-grabbing blank-slate symbols.