Well, this isn’t exactly Homeward Bound 2, is it? Hungarian drama White God exhibits all the cliches of those Lost Dog movies that Disney don’t make any more. However, filtered through a Romanian New Wave realism, it subverts the tropes before reinventing itself as a horror.
Teenage Budapest trumpeter Lili (Psotta) is forced to live with her estranged father Daniel (Zsoter) in his tiny apartment when mum takes off with her new beau. Daniel wasn’t counting on Hagen, Lili’s Labrador crossbreed, barking up a storm. Tempers soon flare and it’s not long before Hagen is unceremoniously dumped on the side of the road, a tearful Lili vowing to find him again. So begins the long trek towards finding each other again.
White God sets itself up as just another cloying Disney drama aimed at ten-year-olds: there’s the miserable hag who threatens to call the authorities, the nasty dogcatcher, the bad butcher, the kind homeless man. There are the friendly dogs that Hagen meets along the way, and a doggy hangout in a scene that awaits the celebrity voices that never come. It’s cute, it’s nice, it’s familiar.
But then Kornel Mundruczo (Delta, Tender Son) goes about stripping all that away. There were hints that something darker was afoot – Daniel observing the carving of a cow’s carcass in a slaughterhouse, there’s a genuine nasty streak to that hag, and the dogcatcher isn’t a bumbling comic – but the unexpected switch in tone heralds the real surprises.
In the most memorable sequence, the ‘kind’ homeless man sells Hagen to a restaurant owner who dabbles in the dog fighting underworld. Through torture and manipulation, Hagen is stripped of his loveable persona, becoming a vicious fighting machine. When Hagen uses his new skills to exact a terrible revenge on all who wronged him, this rebellion is mirrored by Lili’s lashing out at her grumpy orchestra conductor.
It’s only when White God takes this turn for the metaphorical, becoming a mashup of Cujo and Planet of the Apes, that Mundruczo’s strong grasp on the material loosens somewhat. But the director gets a wonderful ‘performance’ from that dog (played by Body and Jake); its eyes slowly changing from friendly to cold. It’s scary stuff, and Mundruczo pulls wonderful poses from his canine cast.