White God review – surreal dog-uprising thriller with bite

Kornél Mundruczó’s work has in the past been self-conscious, opaque and implausible. Well, implausibility is probably still an issue with his new film, but there has been a great leap forward in energy, flair and imagination. It’s a more arresting and entertaining movie than I ever expected from this director: a captivatingly bizarre quasi-horror thriller drama about a mass canine uprising in Budapest that could have been crafted by Hitchcock or James Herbert. Lili is an unhappy little girl who has to go and live with her disagreeable dad when her parents split up. He hates her beloved labrador cross, Hagen, and chucks him out on the street. The animal is found and trained up as a fighting dog – a perversion of his gentle nature that eerily coincides with a general psychotic outbreak affecting all the dogs in the city. The chase scene involving them all is a masterpiece of animal choreography – achieved, evidently, without any digital trickery. This is an intriguingly deadpan, almost unclassifiable satire of power relations, a subversive reverie about the prosperous classes in any city and their fear of what lies beneath. Or perhaps it’s a parable of the resentment in all families, broken and unbroken – a resentment that sometimes can’t be brought to heel. Either way, this is a film with a rottweiler’s bite.