Black Dog received its UK Premiere tonight at the 2024 Edinburgh International Film Festival, both director Guan Hu and producer Liang Jing were present to meet the audience.

★★★★★ 5/5

Black Dog is a 2024 Chinese film directed by Guan Hu and starring Eddie Peng. The film had its world premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on 18 May 2024, where it won the Un Certain Regard prize.

From the provocative Design of Death to the over-the-top The chef, the actor, the scoundrel to the sprawling war epic The Eight Hundred, director Guan Hu’s work over the years has been marked by increasingly ambitious in scope and elaborate in display.

Black Dog is a pivot for Hu’s narrative focus, indicated by the film setting in Western China – far removed from Beijing, where audiences are accustomed to. That’s not to say the gravity of Beijing doesn’t weigh on the film.

The opening sequence is that of a coach veering away from a stampede and toppling over in the fringes of the Gobi Desert. The hoard consists of a seemingly endless number of stray dogs.

Despite the uncanny prelude, the glaring anomaly lies in the reaction and figure of one of the passengers, who almost immediately after the collision sets off along the trail. A suit clad passenger gathers the rest of the company under an accusative threat. He has a stack of cash missing and is convinced that it has been stolen. The police arrive and demands the vagabond comply with the interrogation. The man conforms. A glance at his shaven head and muted stubbornness suggests a history with authority.

The film follows this monk-like ex-convict, Lang— a stray in his own respect. Played by Eddie Peng, the stray man sticks out like a sore thumb. Hu has admittedly stated that Peng was too handsome and so every effort was made to give Peng a rugged visage to match the landscape. Whilst it can’t be said the dissonance between Peng and the town had been muffled, the outcome aligns with the intention of portraying the character as an outsider.

The psuedo-western filter to the story is legitimised by a bounty hunting sequence. The “wanted” is an undesired, potentially rabies-infected greyhound. Attempting to catch a dog renown for its speed is no easy feat, and in this case leads to a flip-flopping cat-and-mouse chase. This battle is drawn out to near-comedic effect, as the two strays urinate in the same spot – vying for dominance.

After having been bitten by the Black Dog, Lang returns to shelter to mend his wounds. It appears he is unaware of the consequences of a rabies infection as he continues his daily routine of being tortured for his crime by the local gangster “Butcher Hu. The stray-man was convicted of manslaughter after killing the nephew of the Butcher and his routine “check-ups” are a punishment to tempt a confession of remorse. Fortunately, the stray-man is childhood friends with the local police commissioner who bails him out of the scheduled torment. On a lift back to the station, the police officer points out a classmate who had become an impromptu traffic warden out of rabies-induced delirium.

This is where the film has an equivalent in spirit to a sequence in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, where Pi and Richard Parker (the tiger) are locked in a tense standoff in a raft boat in the middle of the ocean. The forces of nature intervene in the form of a thunderstorm to present a ceasefire. In Black Dog the van is the ship and the Gobi Desert sets the scene. Divine intervention manifests in the form of a desert hurricane. A truce is called.

The stray-man keeps the stray dog captive in his home. Captivity does not accurately reflect the situation. Though in this situation a single word cannot encapsulate what is happening. The Black Dog is being hidden from the authorities who are on the hunt.

So is the Black Dog being saved?
Does Lang seek redemption through an act of benevolence?
Or is it a selfish projection of himself onto the maligned dog?
Is it sinister in intent – to inflict upon another being one’s own trauma?
Is this the son becoming the father (a zookeeper by profession)?
Is this the son spiritually defying the father by removing the trusted cage – an open provoke?

Both Lang and the Black Dog are complicit through death. Their collective psyche meandering in a liberating prison.

The subsequent series of events cannot be described accurately without sacrificing the Geist of things. A wonderfully incoherent synthesis of realism and the fantastical that can be interpreted as an elegy to life, death and re-birth. Lang lives again.

Whilst the exploration of the woes of rapid economic development on remote ares at this scale may be a foreign topic for British audience, there is a key shared experience that overlaps within a time of 4 years. The film is set at the eve of the commencement of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Hu overtly points out the absurdity of the festivities in the context of wider national concerns, even drawing comparisons to its theatrics to those of a vaudeville troupe. The sentiment was similarly echoed in Britain during the 2012 London Olympics from neglected regions in the North of England. Also in hosting town Stratford – where the locality was rebranded and retrofitted to a point where it shares little to no connection to what the town once represented.

Black Dog invites the viewer to consider social spaces and infrastructure as being intrinsically tied to the individual, collective and national psyche. It is a film that deserves to be seen and enriched by multiple viewings.

In UK and Ireland cinemas from 30 August.