"Burning Dog" Review
"Burning Dog" is writer/director Trey Batchelor's feature-length, first-person, accidental passenger seat criminal conspiracy cut scene. It's an experimental whodunnit for the Twitch age. "Burning Dog" is a video game movie for those already resolute to watching somebody else navigate the game better than they can.
A video game designer who we come to know as "Five" (voiced Adam Bartley) is charged with the task of urgently coming up with a new game pitch. Searching for inspiration, he stumbles into a criminal conspiracy, with overlapping intelligence agencies, mobsters, assassins and the evergreen corrupt L.A cops.
"Burning Dog" has a quality that's hard to articulate. In so many ways, by design, you're able to retreat from actively trying to penetrate the characters or the plot. Being anchored to "Five" - who has no clue what's going on - means that you're never short of the next essential expository "here we are in the plot" dump to remain oriented in this conspiratorial quagmire. It felt around each corner was another interested party attempting to blackmail and entrap the players. However, there's a strange quality in these experiential plotted POV experiments that makes you search the boundaries of the locked off frame.
While its stylistic sister film "Hardcore Henry" uses the movement, action and the intensity to keep you trapped, "Burning Dog" must continue regular figurative finger snaps of new information, new characters, new locations. Batchelor's characters feel, by design, to speak in this weird archetypal double talk. There's strange predictability in the dialogue. One wonders if Batchelor's cliche laden dialogue was designed to have that game character, 'information relay' quality. It will send your eye rolls into a spin cycle.
The rigid and largely un-cinematic intentional limitation of the camera attached to our guy "Five" has two distinct effects. You begin to notice the attempts to recreate the naturalism of "Five" fidgeting uncomfortably in each new scenario. Conversely when the camera stops - say when our unseen leading man is restrained - you find yourself searching the entire frame. Without going into spoilers, it's one way that the film encourages more active engagement in what's happening. The only performers in the frame that made my heart rhythms change were Greg Grunberg's pronunciation obsessed Smythe, and Eddie "Livingston Dell" Jemison.
"Burning Dog" is genre collision, a bridge between playing games, watching games be played (Twitch) and a classic suspense thriller. While the film doesn't transcend the sum of its parts, the results of this experiment are curiously engaging.
★★/★★★★
[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5-4F989PF4&w=854&h=480]
