Crew
Director – Valerie Buhagiar, Screenplay – Anthony Artibello & Sheila Rogerson, Based on the Novel The Dogs (2015) by Allan Stratton, Producers – Anthony Artibello, Jason Ross Jallet, James Milligan & Sheila Rogerson, Photography – Mathieu Seguin, Music – Oliver Wickham, Visual Effects – WildFX (Supervisor – Jeff Bruneel), Special Effects Supervisor – Max McDonald, Production Design – Sandra Smirle. Production Company – Wild Media Entertainment/2ofaMind Productions/Northern Ontario Heritage Fund/Ontario Creates.
Cast
Donovan Colon (Cameron Weaver), Kathleen Munroe (Katherine Weaver), Kris Holden-Ried (Ken Armstrong), Dylan Taylor (Mike Weaver), Asher Grayson (Jacky McTavish), Stuart Hughes (Art Sinclair), Aidan Kalechstein (Cody Murphy), Ian Ho (Ben), Patrice Goodman (Officer Culp), Clare Coulter (Hannah Murphy), Steven McCarthy (Frank McTavish), Andrea Grant (Evelyn McTavish)
Plot
Young Cameron Weaver is woken in the night by his mother Katherine who insists that her abusive ex has been lurking outside their apartment despite a restraining order against him. She gets Cameron to pack his things and they flee, eventually arriving in the tiny town of Wolf Hollow. There she rents an old, dilapidated farmhouse. Cameron is placed in school, while Kathleen gets a job working for the realtor Ken Armstrong and eventually becomes involved with him. Cameron is drawn to the history of the house and learns how a previous owner murdered his family and was then torn apart by dogs. As Cameron looks further, he is visited by ghosts of the owners and pursued by ghost dogs. However, his attempts to explain what he is seeing to his mother are dismissed.
Valerie Buhagiar in actress who has been working since the mid-1980s. She has appeared in quite a lot of things – everything from episodes of DeGrassi: The Next Generation (2001-15), Beauty and the Beast (2012-6) to genre works like The Expanse (2015-22) and Titans (2018-23). In my opinion, she can be seen at her best in Bruce McDonald’s early films Roadkill (1989) and Highway 61 (1991). She has also directed three other films, all dramas, with The Anniversary (2014), the afterlife film It’s Hard to Be Human (2018) and Carmen (2021). She can be briefly seen on screen in The Dogs in an unspeaking role as the nurse who attends the old lady during the scene where Donovan Colon visits the hospital.
The film is adapted from The Dogs (2015) by Canadian author Allan Stratton. The surprise to find is that Stratton’s book is written as a Young Adult novel, as is much of his fiction. The film retains the child protagonist as the central figure but you would never guess from the film’s pitch and adult sensibilities that it was intended for a teen audience – it certainly doesn’t come across as a young person’s intended film. Indeed, the film’s premiere was at various international film festivals ie. the place where it seen as a work of the arts usually intended for grown-up audiences.
When you strip all of the arthouse element out, the surprise is that The Dogs is little more than a traditional ghost story. The disappointment of Valerie Buhagiar’s handling on the ghost story side is that she and the story do no more than turn over the cliches of the genre – the house with the past where a terrible crime happened; the ghosts of the past crying out to those in the present for expiation; the protagonist who starts to investigate the house’s history; their belief in the certainty of the ghosts being dismissed usually as symptoms of mental health (here as rebellious teen behaviour or the kid just having imagined it) by those around them.
Buhagiar does okay with the ghost story element – the appearances of the ghost boy, the horde of attacking ghost dogs – but eventually nothing to write home about. Her greater strength however is the development of the characters. In particular, she emphasizes the whole aspect of the protagonist being doubted by their family in what they claim to see. The backbone of the film becomes young Donovan Colon trying to be believed in what he saw and coming to doubt his mother’s claims about her ex as an abuser and turning to him to seek support. This Buhagiar delivers with reasonable affect. Although the biggest problem I had in watching the film is the quiet dialogue and a soundtrack, particularly a score, that often drowns leaves you straining to hear what is being said.
Trailer here