Do you remember the shivers up your spine when you first watched “Twin Peaks”? Do you remember the strange English of those who entered the dwarf’s house? Or Laura Palmer’s body? Or the macabre magnetism of the forest that hid terrifying secrets? All those are somewhat filtered in the short film ‘Dog‘, which, far from being a pastiche of the famous series by David Lynch, manages to meet the demands of that Lynchian atmosphere. Laurie Corlett-Donald offers us through his experimental project a brutal immersion in the mental universe of a narrator-character, located on the border between reality and dream.
Designed as a kind of cinematic essay-poem on the idea of depression, this short film combines not only images and sounds, but also words and symbols that explore the opposition between the daily mutism and the inner noise of a tormented mind. Such a project is almost always a sensory experience rather than a coherent and homogeneous exploration of a narrative thread. That is why this short film is more like an emotional shock, a kind of visceral meditation on the condition of a person suffering from depression, illustrating in a symbolic way the act of (self-)killing as a form of cyclical manifestation of the soul’s disease.
The project signed by Laurie Corlett-Donald has the unity and vibration of a poem that is not conditioned by the rigors of a conventional narrative and that, obviously, will not please all viewers. However, the apparent simplicity of a film devoid of bombastic ornaments or special effects has such a well-defined concept that its atmosphere leaves a mark on the mind of the viewer after it ends. This happens because the director succeeds in creating a universe that is both familiar and strange, convincingly combining recognizable elements with suggestive nightmarish details. ‘Dog’ invites its viewers to an immersive experience through the dark corners of a grieving mind, through an extreme existential fragment, short-circuited by bloody strobes, while listening to the interventions of a sorrow narrative voice whose “backward” English subtextually defines depression as an act of understanding one’s life only as a prologue to extinction.
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