Dog Skin
2019 · 13m · United Kingdom
Directed by Tiago Teixeira
Genres: fantasy, horror, surrealism
A man on the run is haunted by nightly visions of a dog that transforms into a mysterious woman, and as his grip on reality loosens, his obsession takes a dark turn.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A man being hunted by his own hallucinatory desire—that's the kind of premise that makes you sit up. Teixeira doesn't settle for "spooked guy sees dog-woman," he uses the transformation as psychological collapse, which is exactly the kind of subversive turn most scouts would bury.
The film situates itself in a lineage of European surrealist horror—Švankmajer's DNA is visible—and Teixeira's command of image-to-image syntax, the way each vision fractures into the next, shows a director conversant with the formal language of the form.
The singular choice here is the decision to blur the dog and woman's faces identically across transformations—it's a small edit, barely perceptible, but it's what makes the obsession feel *real* instead of effects-driven, and that restraint is what sells the whole descent.