How is the Dog
2023 · 10m · USA
Directed by Mick Robertson
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
A grieving woman flees to the countryside hoping distance equals peace. Phone calls, letters, and voicemails arrive instead — and the autumn around her starts to feel like a co-conspirator.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Grief-horror is one cliched scene away from being a Lifetime movie at all times — what saves this is the sound design carrying the dread instead of a guy in a mask. I'll always take a film that trusts its ears.
The horror is entirely epistolary — phone calls, letters, voicemails — so the threat exists only in audio. That's a much harder trick than shadow-work, and the Morvern-Callar grief-as-landscape register is right.
The horror is entirely epistolary — phone calls, letters, voicemails — so the threat exists only in the audio register. That's a much harder trick than putting a thing in shadows and the sound design is doing all the work.