Movie Thoughts: White God (2014)

 

• Released: May 17th, 2014
  
• Directed by: Kornél Mundruczó
• Running time: 2h 1min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

A girl named Lili is devastated when her father leaves her beloved dog Hagen out on the streets to fend for himself. While Lili looks for her dog, Hagen ends up going down a dark path of vengeance against humanity.

My Thoughts

This got recommended to me in a xenofiction Discord server I'm in. And while this movie partially qualifies as xenofiction, please don't go in expecting it to be about the dogs only. A very large portion of the movie is actually spent with the main human characters: Lili and her father.

And this is also where one of my main issues with the movie lies: Lili and her father are quite frankly pretty boring characters and they do not carry the movie at all for me. Lili's father is a genuine asshole, and Lili herself is just a pretty standard kid character with not a lot of unique qualities to her that really set her apart from the archetype. Hagen, the dog, honestly has the far more interesting scenes in this movie. His character development is far more interesting than that of any of the human characters. And Hagen doesn't even talk. So that's saying something.

The pacing of this movie could also feel painfully slow at times, especially up until the climax. I kept waiting for interesting stuff to happen but instead we're mostly just aimlessly spending time with Lili at her orchestra and with her father. All the while I was thinking, can we please get back to Hagen so we can at least get some interesting scenes?  

Another issue I had is the shaky camera this movie has sometimes. It's not present in every shot or scene, but in some scenes it really can be quite dizzying just how much the camera moves. And while this might work for some chaotic action scenes, a lot of the scenes which have this shaky camera are just mellow slow-paced scenes. Which is where the shaky cam really doesn't work. It was very distracting.

Finally, I also thought the final scene was a bit of a cop-out. Lili literally manages to calm down the dogs by playing her trumpet. Yes, really. I don't know, that just kinda felt too perfect and childlike for such an otherwise dark movie. This feels like an ending you might find in a family cartoon, not a serious thriller which has scenes of dogs brutally murdering people. And then the movie just sort of just, ends. Lili calms down the dogs and lays down in front of Hagen, and that's the end. Okay, I guess? No tearful reunion between Lili and Hagen? No downer ending where Hagen kills her, either? The movie just ends on an ambiguous shot and that's it. How vague.

So despite my harsh review, I don't hate this movie or anything. I just didn't think it was very good, especially the stuff with the human characters. If this had just been Hagen's story I honestly might've given it a pretty high rating, because the stuff with the dogs is overall pretty good and interesting. But we have so many scenes of the boring human characters doing boring human things and I just kept mentally checking out during these parts.