QCinema 2018 | Dog Days

The first act of Timmy Harn's Dog Days is exciting stuff. There's a blood sacrifice that gives a half African-american child supernatural powers. There's sex and basketball and a crazy aunt. There's a magical, mysterious Mitsubishi Galant. It's all crazy, but not too crazy. The first act of Dog Days is worth the price of admission.

Then things get weirder. Once the second act kicks in, the plot goes in weirder and weirder directions. Or rather, you can say that the film decides to stay still and chill for a while. It's as if the movie itself took drugs and the high only kicked in during the second act. But this high is more weed than speed, and the film ends up meandering and bloated by the third act, becoming even harder and harder to engage with it.

There are some interesting ideas at play here, like how the Galant represents the main character's mother, or how it eventually ties into a sort of Oedipal dynamic, as there's a lot of sex in or near cars in this film. There are also thoughts about corruption in the drug trade, our inherent racism towards foreigners, the effect of a broken family, and the perils of nepotism. The ending even has an interesting turn where the mother-son dynamic (or rather the car-son dynamic) is pushed to extremes, with the son yearning to return to the mother's womb when all is said and done. But that's all kind of lost by the ending, where the high seems to have worn off and we are returned to some semblance of reality.