Review of White God (2014) by Cigs J — 08 Nov 2016

Hungarian with subtitles.

Director - Kornel Mundruczo. Well you don't see films like this every day! It starts with an eerily empty Budapest, a car has been abandoned open-doored on a bridge, a young teenage girl, Lili (Zsofia Psotta) is cycling through the empty streets. Then she turns around to the sound of barking and sees a huge pack of dogs rapidly gaining on her, but oddly she doesn't seem alarmed - what is going on? It then cuts back in time to her mother dropping her off with her estranged father, she also has Hagen a labrador \ hound mixed breed, whom she adores. The father does not want the dog as he'd have to pay a tax on it and Hagen is ruthlessly abandoned on the side of the road with Lili in tears.

This is Hagen's tale and could be taken as a metaphor for the marginalised and oppressed. He endures a series of misadventures including being chased relentlessly by city dog catchers - amazing to see a dog chase such as this. Eventually he ends up in the hands of a brutal thug who through punishment and beatings turns him into a killer for the dog fighting underworld. There are some tough dog fighting scenes which dog lovers may be uneasy with, but no dogs were actually hurt in any way in the making of the film. Meanwhile, Lili is also coming of age and starts to party out, gets into trouble and generally does the things that teenager experiment with.

The third part of the film is all about Hagen taking bloody revenge on all who wronged him - it starts with the mass escape of hundreds of dogs from the city dog pound. Somehow the dogs are acting under his guidance and with intelligence. Whether you accept this premise or not, its impressive how the director manages to somehow orchestrate dozens of running dogs into a coherent story line. The climax is a tense face off between Lili and the now feral, savage, Hagen .