Never work with children and animals and once upon a time films featuring children and animals were so saccharine you might have said never watch films in which children and animals appear. In Kornel Mundruczo's "Whiite God" there is a child, (the excellent Zsofia Psotta), and an awful lot of animals, (in this case, dogs), but there is nothing saccharine about this powerful Hungarian film; indeed the complete opposite is true. This violent, adult movie is sure to upset animal lovers and it's certainly not aimed at children.
It begins when Lili, (Psotta), goes to stay with her estranged father, bringing her beloved dog with her but her father refuses to keep the dog in the apartment and lets it loose to roam the streets of Budapest leaving Lili to search for him. Mundruczo's film is like an X-rated version of "Lassie Come Home". It begins benignly enough even if there is an underlying tension between the characters, (Lili is one of the very few sympathetic people onscreen and even she isn't particularly likeable), before moving into much darker, surreal horror-movie territory. Disturbing as these climatic scenes are, I feel the film and its message would have been better served with a more realistic approach. Still, it makes for suitably uneasy viewing while the dogs themselves 'perform' quite magnificently.
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