My Dog Killer

Ça faisait longtemps que je n’avais pas passé une soirée cinéma aussi médiocre. Après le désolant Un Prof pas comme les autres, j’ai porté mon dévolu sur cette crasse slovaco-tchèque. Le scénario est vraiment mauvais, le jeu d’acteur pas convaincant pour un sou et il y a plein de séquences longues et barbantes et d’illogismes. Je pense comprendre pourquoi il n’a pas plus été encensé par le public tchécoslovaque et, aussi, pourquoi il a bien marché dans les festivals à l’étranger. (24/09/2014)

In a nutshell, it is captured by the scene in the shoddy train station. It starts with an authentic-sounding monologue on the edge of the shot, which has a flow and an edge, and continues with arranged racist shouting, in which even anonymous voices in the background sound like a controlled chorus. It ends with a poser moment at the railway station, where the protagonist, who defended the Roma "a little", is watched by a chorus of white fellow citizens as a foreign object. It always evokes a certain awkwardness, ostentation, play on effect, albeit many times more stimulating and arranged than in Foxes. In my opinion, even the dramaturgy is not OK - again we have a protagonist who behaves unpredictably, while the main motivation is only clarified after one starts to think a little angrily about whether he has anything to do with another of the director's hysterical creations. However, it is more than bearable, especially thanks to the camera, the work with the environment of the scenic social periphery, which helps the dialogues. They still sound like chants sung an octave higher or lower... Non-actors simply can't handle a learned script other than with a recited text. Sometimes it's funny how hard they try (the character of the protagonist's neighbor). Wouldn't it really be worth it to look for inspiration from Dresen, Seidl and others? Overall, My Dog Killer seems to me like a film which, despite its great ambitions and fundamental theme, gets a little stuck in infantile and static gestures. In order for a character to come to life in infinitely long wordless shots, it requires more than just the decently mastered language of others. Even so, I consider this to be quite a sympathetic attempt that paves the way (already a well-trodden path elsewhere). (21/03/2013)

Too long, visually monotonous shots take away from the punch of My Dog Killer and make it a rather boring spectacle. Which is a bit of a shame, because otherwise this realistic social drama is a valuable testimony. (60%) (22/08/2022)

But yeah, let the young filmmakers experiment if they want to, but this "raw" depiction of our time, which is actually just shallow, simply cannot captivate the audience. The acting performances are simply bad. Non-actors may deepen the atmosphere, but in this case, they simply undermine it. Nothing can be done about it. As an experiment, why not, but it's just a boring exploration of one person's life. Actually, of one day in one person's life. And not much happens, even though the creators claim otherwise. (15/04/2014)