Get the latest gossip
‘Black Dog’ Review: A Resonant, Visually Resplendent China-Noir About Taming the Mad Dog Within
A troubled loner returns to his hometown and bonds with a possibly rabid canine in Chinese director Guan Hu's magnificently shot fable "Black Dog."
Set in a dying town on the fringes of the Gobi desert, “Black Dog” has elements of the genre western, like taciturn loner antihero Lang (a fantastic Eddie Peng), who returns to his eroded hometown himself hollowed out by repressed guilt for the incident that caused his recent imprisonment. A striking opening setpiece acquaints us immediately with the bleach-bone splendor of DP Gao Weizhe’s widescreen shotmaking, in which skies are the color of acid-washed denim and the far-off mountains and nearby escarpments look as forbidding as the surface of some uninhabited planet. But Gao’s visuals are so very cool — in both senses, the blue-green grade casting a chilly seaglass pall over everything — that they become self-justifying: exquisite shots of wild animals roaming the boarded-up streets, of a far-off figure dangling from a bungee off an industrial crane, or of Lang silently absorbed in soldering a makeshift sidecar to Black Dog’s specific dimensions.
Or read this on Variety