Review of Straw Dogs (1971) by Nathan N — 26 Aug 2009

Director Sam Peckinpah's first non-Western film entry, Straw Dogs is a violent and thought-provoking meditation on violence, manhood, and marriage. Passive mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) and his wife Amy (Susan George) leave America for the apparent peace and quiet of her hometown in England, to escape war protests and escalating violence at home.

What starts as a strange and slow-paced marital drama takes a sudden violent turn when some local men hired to build a garage for the couple continue to antagonize them, leading up to Amy being raped by two of them.

This scene is the centerpiece of the film, and is part of the reason that it's still controversial today. Peckinpah films the scene with a fair amount of ambiguity, which ultimately makes it all the more disorienting and disturbing.

After this turn, tensions build into a violent home invasion which uses Peckinpah's trademarks (slow motion shots and chopped-up montage sequences) in a frighteningly realistic way. Hoffman plays well against-type as a man driven to a frightening act of violence, and George is excellent in a daring performance.

it's not a movie everyone will enjoy, but it's definitely frightening, thought-provoking, and just might take more than one viewing to crack.