One must applaud writer/director Daniel Raboldt’s choices with regards to conciseness in his screenplay for A Living Dog. This is a post-apocalyptic survivalist drama without a single word of spoken or Signed dialogue – beyond a couple of exclamatory words, shouted into the ether – until the final minute. Even then, Tomasz (Stefan Ebel) only says two words, also shouted into the ether. It should be noted that this is by storytelling design. The poor humans caught up in the destruction of the world by the extraterrestrial machines would do well not to speak aloud, lest the machines hear them and attack. We have seen that concept before, but it was still in a big blockbuster in which those characters whispered their dialogue. Here, we get none of that.
This means one big thing for Raboldt: He has removed himself from the burden of an exposition-driven affair, as we see everything that is relevant to this story happen in front of our eyes and are allowed to come to our own conclusions about what might inform those events. We even get the gist of what brings Tomasz to a lonely and sequestered house, where he sets up a series of protective measures (the most important being a device that surrounds the house in a radial force field), simply by observing his behavior and a few of the items stashed in the house’s basement. The alien machines arrived, killing off most of Earth’s population, and now military forces are fighting back.
We see that effort in the backgrounds of some sequences, brought to life by way of digital effects that were clearly accomplished on the cheap but, just as clearly, not on the quick. The effects here do not share the depth of field and the density of which the best studios are capable. There is a degree of care and attention, though, that can only be described as Raboldt and his effects team showing off work that took months to get to the fairly convincing stage it’s at right now. The movie is not about its action sequences, but when they do arrive, Raboldt stages them with an eye for the geography of the characters and the hugeness of the machines they are fighting.
The same care and attention have not been afforded to the story, which begins as a study of the burdens placed on Tomasz to sally forth with a resistance plan all on his lonesome. Eventually, another human character shows up. She’s Lilja (Siri Nase), a resistance fighter who wishes to strike back against the machines before total destruction is possible. Much of the middle act is devoted to a tiresome back-and-forth that transforms the film’s patient opening half into merely a slog of waiting around for not much to happen.
Eventually, the third act kicks into gear, as Tomasz and Lilja are again separated and the former continues on his path toward either survival or sacrifice. Our investment, though, wanes in the wake of a story that has become repetitive and circular, despite the solid turns from Ebel and Nase as desperate soldiers just laboring to survive in the worst of situations.
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