Valerie Buhagiar’s The Dogs – A Review
by Thom Ernst – Film Correspondent
(July 15, 2024 – Toronto, ON) Director Valerie Buhagiar’s latest film, The Dogs, has me thinking about the late director John Hughes. I credit Hughes for bridging the gap between teen movies and traditional adult-centric films by presenting stories of glorified teen angst without alienating young or old audiences. However, I’ve come to view Hughes’s films as being more fondly remembered than is warranted; movies that fall prey to conventional teenage cliches and adolescent archetypes. Let’s face it: movies, like teenagers, don’t always age well.
So why should Buhagiar’s film spark interest in Hughes’s legacy 15 years after his death? Truth is, I’m not interested in Hughes. What interests me is the stages that teen-focused films travel to get from Hughes to Buhagiar. The chasm between the two filmmakers is vast, and there’d be no comparison if Buhagiar, whose feature films tend to favour adult women in crisis, had yet to take on a screen adaptation of a YA novel. I am not privy to the entire wealth of Buhagiar’s career, but she is entering new territory with The Dogs.
The Dogs is based on author Allan Stratton’s award-winning YA novel. It’s a story about a teenage boy and his mother, pried from the comfort of one home to set up life in another. I have yet to read Stratton’s book, which, until recently, has not found its way into my realm of consciousness. Even if it had, I don’t read YA novels. Quite a declaration, I know. But, I haven’t knowingly read a YA novel since I, too, was a young adult—although arguably, I was never young and an adult at the same time. I’m not even sure YA books were a thing when I was a kid. I knew the works of Franklin W. Dixon, S.E. Hinton, and (though not officially a YA author) John Wyndham, but if they were branded and marketed as YA novels, it was without my knowledge. Had I been aware that those books were part of a qualifying category that fell below my age group, I would not have been as anxious to see the film versions of Dixon’s The Hardy Boys (there are many) or Francis Ford Coppola’s take on Hinton’s Rumble Fish (1983) and The Outsiders (1983)
But The Dogs is a different animal. And with Buhagiar attached, the film has bite. Touches of Buhagiar’s previous films are tucked into the crevasses and seams of the story, characters whose basic humanity is left to battle threats of distrust and despondency. And here, too, are the foundations frequently felt in Buhagiar’s work of unity, even in a world of abandonment and hope in the face of despair. This might be Buhagiar’s most accessible venture to date. Yet I worry that the term ‘accessible’ suggests something formulaic and safe. Because that’s not the case with The Dogs. Screenwriters Anthony Artibello’s and Sheila Rogerson’s script plays along the edge of fantasy and authenticity, a daring merge of mystery, social drama, and the paranormal.
Buhagiar is well served by the collaborating efforts of the performers, who seem equally dedicated to the project. Donovan Colan is Cameron Weaver (pictured above), the young boy whose quality of life is routinely disrupted courtesy of his mother’s fear that Cameron’s father is but a few steps behind them, forcing Cameron and his mother to retreat to a secluded farmhouse where, once again, they attempt to start life anew. Colan manages a performance that bounces between the tumultuous extremes of teenage disassociation and a lingering, almost tender, need for attention. Soon after moving into the farmhouse, Cameron starts experiencing things that can’t be real: A ghostly child (Asher Grayson) appears, and suspicions of an unsolved murder occurring in the farmhouse lead Cameron to make some poor and perhaps fatal choices.
Kathleen Munroe plays Cameron’s mother. Her role is not diminished or distracted by the film’s focus on Cameron or its mystery, an engaging story of a lost family, not unlike the Weavers, who lived in the farmhouse before them. Munroe recognizes her character is broken, living in fear and frequently lost. But perhaps because she has Cameron, she acts not on her brokenness but with a stalwart determination to turn things around.
Buhagiar’s way of telling a story, even a straight-ahead narrative like The Dogs, is to pay attention to the shadows, to see what lingers in them, what might jump from out of them, and what might pull you into them.
The Dogs screens as part of Toronto’s Female Eye Film Festival, July 20, 6:30 pm at TIFF Lightbox, Cinema 4.
Images courtesy of Wild Media Entertainment.
Thom Ernst is a Toronto based film critic and writer and an active member of the (TFCA) Toronto Film Critics’ Association. His work has appeared in various publications including Playback Magazine, The Toronto Star, and The National Post. He is also a contributor to Original Cin. Known to CBC Radio listeners for his lively contributions to Fresh Air, Metro Morning, and CBC Syndication as well as appearing on-air for CTV News Channel and The Agenda with Steve Paikin. He was host, interviewer and producer of televisions’ longest running movie program <em>Saturday Night at the Movies</em>.
