In Review: 'Dog,' 'The Cursed'

Channing Tatum hits the road for a canine 'The Last Detail' and a werewolf plague sweeps through the 19th century French countryside in Sean Ellis' semi-arty horror movie.

Dog
Dir. Reid Carolin and Channing Tatum
90 min.

A road movie with an easy-to-spot final destination, Dog stars Channing Tatum as Briggs, a burned-out ex-Army Ranger who’s desperate to land a job as security contractor despite a history of brain injuries and a case of PTSD he does his best to ignore. How desperate? In order to secure a crucial letter of recommendation from a former CO, he agrees to drive Lulu, a Belgian Malinois he served beside in Afghanistan, across several states to the funeral of her handler, an army buddy who’s recently taken his own life. Lulu hates Briggs, but that’s not a surprise. Highly trained but traumatized by combat (just like Briggs), she now lashes out at just about everyone and, after paying her last respects, is on track to be put down. (It’s kind of like The Last Detail but with a soulful-eye dog instead of Randy Quaid and a lethal injection instead of the brig.) But, is it possible that, despite their initial antipathy, man and dog will bond over the course of their journey?

Quite! But if Dog’s outcome is never in doubt, the film, co-directed by Tatum and Reid Carolin (writer of Magic Mike and a frequent Tatum collaborator) and beautifully shot by Newton Thomas Sigel, doesn’t take the easy route getting there. Dog has been packaged as a light comedy. (Tagline: “A filthy animal unfit for human company and a… DOG.”) And it briefly turns into one during an awkward stretch in which Briggs poses as blind only to be exposed when Lulu attacks a man in traditional Middle Eastern attire. But that proves something of an outlier in a film that frequently pushes comedy aside to focus on veterans’ difficult coming home experiences. Both man and dog have been trained to do a tough job then left haunted and directionless when the job ends.

Dominated by scenes in which Briggs has one-way conversations with Lulu,  much of the film rests on Tatum’s broad shoulders. Though the dog certainly helps, Tatum carries it well, playing Briggs as a man who’d love to leave boozy, sleepless nights behind him but can’t find the way out. In classic road movie tradition, however, each stop along the way brings him closer to a deeper understanding of himself via encounters with colorful characters, whether a pair of tantric healers or an unexpected stopover at the home of a pot farmer (Kevin Nash) and his psychic wife (Jane Addams). Some stops play better than others. Briggs finds only the most stereotype-filled Portland neighborhoods, but an L.A. visit to the home of dog-loving veteran (Ethan Suplee) who’s put in hard work to get through his own trauma helps bring the themes into focus in the home stretch. It’s a film with a foregone conclusion but one given resonance by the unhappy endings that inspired it. —Keith Phipps

The Cursed
Dir. Sean Ellis
111 min.

The trick of Robert Eggers’ The Witch is that it’s frightening well before any supernatural business comes into play. For a Puritan family living in exile in 1630s New England, the ascetic extremes of day-to-day life, reflected in the barren farmland that buffets an ominous forest, are already a psychological horror, making them vulnerable to the inexplicable stresses to come. All that detail pays off later, because the harrowing facts of how the family lives make their survival even more precarious when the actual “horror” starts– they’re already on a precipice. 

No doubt writer-director Sean Ellis (Cashback, Anthropoid) had films like The Witch or Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale in mind when conceiving his period horror film The Cursed, which debuted at Sundance a year ago under the much more evocative title Eight for Silver. Unlike the family in The Witch, the Laurents enjoy immense privilege, occupying a mansion in the French countryside in the late 19th century, where a small service staff meets their every need. But there’s no defense against the forces that will consume them, against whom the family’s privilege and power may as well be papier-mâché. Such are the costs of colonial instincts, at least in this fictional realm. 

Caught in a no man’s land between art-horror and CGI gorefest, The Cursed isn’t satisfying in either regard, hastily establishing its historical bonafides before getting to the shock-scares and digitally enhanced werewolves. For a story that opens in the trenches of World War I and flashes back 35 years earlier, the film seems only half-engaged in the relationship between grim period realities and the supernatural phenomena they triggered. Ellis could have made something closer to The Witch, in which the family’s mistakes exact a major psychic cost, or he could have made a bloody, gonzo creature feature that goes heavy on the visceral thrills. Splitting the difference is a bad idea. 

It does have one extraordinary sequence, however. When a Roma clan claims a legitimate stake in the vast property around his estate, Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie) resolves to have local mercenaries drive the gypsies off the land under threat of violence. In a bravura piece of filmmaking, Ellis stations the camera in a long shot outside their encampment, watching from a distance as Seamus’ ultimatum is refused and the mercenaries proceed to shoot the scattering Roma and set fire to their tents. From that distance, we can see how efficiently a genocide can get carried out as well as the comprehensive scope of it—a horror more persuasive than anything that follows. Before getting buried alive in a trench, the last survivor leaves a curse on the community responsible for this atrocity, summoning a monster plague.

As a mysterious creature starts ripping through the area, an outsider, dashing pathologist John McBride (Boyd Holbrook, reliably dull) comes sweeping through at the Laurents’ request, since their son is among the missing. This sets up a bodice-popping romance between McBride and Seamus’ wife Isabelle (Kelly Reilly), who can’t be happy married to such a vile drip, but there are werewolves on the loose, growing in number as they turn their victims. There are other questions that need answering, too, like why McBride has such an interest in werewolves or what the WWI opening was all about. 

The Cursed is by no means a piece of hackwork, which actually makes its failures cut deeper. Ellis is a fine stylist who’s building his genre film on a conceptually sturdy foundation, using werewolf legend as a means to address the evils of colonialist land-grabs and the blowback that can result from it. But around the halfway mark, the grisly action takes over and The Cursed turns into a more familiar, forgettable battle for survival against creatures of the night. At a certain point, you’re ready for the silver bullets to get forged. — Scott Tobias

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