Black Dog

A film of expansive visual power, of so many rolling desert vistas and desolate townscapes coated in metallic gray, “Black Dog” depicts the transformation of rural China in recent decades through the washed-out aesthetic of a charcoal painting. At its fore is taciturn ex-con Lang (Eddie Peng), who returns from a prison stint to his industrial hometown near the Gobi Desert. The place is a wasteland: citizens have migrated to city centers, and buildings are nothing but hollow slabs of concrete left to the masses of stray dogs that families left behind. An amusement park where Lang once performed as a motorcycle stuntman is a rickety vestige of a formerly bustling region.

In story, Guan Hu’s film is part neo-Western and part Chinese national portrait, but even more simply, it’s a poignant tale about the bond between a guy and a dog. Lang joins a patrol team tasked with rounding up the scores of strays that locals fear will deter outside investment in their area. As talked about over the town’s loudspeaker, one skinny, particularly troublesome greyhound has eluded the authorities. Lang catches the titular “black dog,” and since his cool, quiet facade conceals a compassionate heart, he ultimately keeps the pup as his own rather than ship him off with other captured hounds. Not everyone in town was happy to see Lang return in the first place, and his resignation from the patrol doesn’t ease the tension.

You could miss the great cameo by Jia Zhangke entirely and still find traces of his work all over “Black Dog,” even if Jia has never made a movie with a through-line as innocent and outwardly sweet as this one can be. Like Jia, Guan maps human-scaled narrative action onto a larger picture of sweeping societal shifts. A difference is that Guan’s storytelling is more clearly allegorical, with the dogs as a symbol for those left behind by the tides of change in China. It’d be on the nose were it not for Guan’s restrained direction, which eschews the easy pathos of close-ups and instead features wide shots that situate human and animals alike within a broader sense of place. His command of the craft is remarkable, and it turns the portrayal of man-dog kinship into something that’s not cheap or cloying, but instead quite moving.

“Black Dog” is playing the 2024 edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival, which runs from Sep 26 - Oct 6 (https://viff.org/festival/viff-2024/).