White God

Pre­sum­ably titled ​‘White God’ because ​‘White Dog’ was already tak­en, Hun­gar­i­an direc­tor Kornél Mundruczó’s high con­cept stunt dra­ma, which took home the Un Cer­tain Regard prize (its Palme Dog coup was far more deserved) at last year’s Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, is essen­tial­ly Spar­ta­cus reimag­ined with a canine cast. Indeed, the film fea­tures no less than 274 hounds, who tear about the streets of mod­ern-day Budapest wreak­ing hav­oc on the unsus­pect­ing mas­ters who have beat­en, caged and trained them to fight for sport in seedy back­street arenas.

Only 13-year-old trum­pet-play­er Lili (Zsó­fia Psot­ta), it seems, is on the side of our poochy pro­tag­o­nists. When her beloved cross­breed Hagen gets boot­ed out by her mean-spir­it­ed pa for no appar­ent rea­son when she goes to stay with him, Lili is deter­mined to track down her best friend before he ends up like so many of the city’s strays. Lit­tle does she know that Hagen’s fate already appears to be sealed hav­ing been picked up by a local dog shel­ter where he’s next in line to take the Long Sleep. But Hagen has oth­er ideas. In an exhil­a­rat­ing sequence he breaks free and mobilis­es a small army of neglect­ed mutts, an event the local author­i­ties are inex­plic­a­bly ill-equipped to deal with.

This is a unique premise exe­cut­ed with gus­to by Mundruczó and his team — spe­cial men­tion to the dog han­dlers and train­ers who helped orches­trate this strange spec­ta­cle, not to men­tion DoP Mar­cell Rév for the vis­cer­al dog’s‑eye-view cam­er­a­work. Yet while White God works as a para­ble for our times — where eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty has widened the gap between the rich and poor — its nov­el­ty val­ue dilutes its core mes­sage. This is an enter­tain­ing, tech­ni­cal­ly accom­plished work, but unlike the 1982 Samuel Fuller race-rela­tions thriller which the title ref­er­ences, its set-up ulti­mate­ly proves distracting.