The Bloodhound (2020)

directed by Patrick Picard

USA

77 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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After watching a completely different film by mistake (who knew so many movies were called "The Bloodhound"?), I finally got to see what has been one of my most anticipated recent films, and it didn't disappoint. This movie is uncanny, uncomfortable, and nightmarish, with just the slightest trace of some weird wry humor that only made everything else about it feel more discomfiting. It's an incredibly stylish debut feature from writer-director Patrick Picard and I'd be very interested to see what he does next.

This is a movie where the house it's set in is as much of a character as the people inside the house, if not more so, and a myriad of stylistic choices are made to ensure this is the case. I think the most immediately obvious of these choices is the way it's shot in such an unusual aspect ratio. Not only is it shot with an extremely wide-angle, slightly fish-eyed lens, but also a very tall one- the effect this produces is that, more often than not, the entirety of a person's body will be in a shot, head to toe and then some, showing not only the floor but also the ceiling and ultimately making it feel like the characters are tiny figures wandering around in an oppressive dreamscape. Having the floor and ceiling visible serves to make the house feel claustrophobic- yet in other shots it feels cavernous. Add to this the dim lighting and the fact that most of it seems to take place at night, with only muted lamps and unexplained flashing red light to illuminate the stuffy rooms, and the whole thing has the exact feeling of a dream where you're wandering through some infinite coat closet or a house you've never been in.

Comparisons to Yorgos Lanthimos are warranted, but the characters here seem much more aware of and unnerved by their situation than characters in Lanthimos' films and how they wander through upsetting situations with no trace of emotion. There's also a little more nonsense than his movies typically have, which is a good thing. The Bloodhound is a loose retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, but it operates exactly like a dream, according to a dream's own self-contained logic. At one point one of the characters says, flatly, "Now I have to turn around ten times to stop the world ending in flames" and then does so. This is where that bizarre humor comes in: things are said that seem like they should be followed with an awkward chuckle to diffuse the situation, but no chuckle ever comes, so we're just left wondering if it was really a joke or not.

The outsider is the main character, who comes to stay at the house of his reclusive friend after some undisclosed situation leaves him homeless, and of the two he seems the most aware that the things going on are not normal, but he becomes so drawn in to this bizarre landscape of the house that even his concerns often don't cover the most blatant of the unusual things that happen to him. He becomes concerned for his friend's sister, who is obviously ill, but no mention is ever made of the fact that he seems to teleport himself out of a locked room at one point. Other people enter the house at the end and perform the functions of their job unimpeded, which I think points towards the explanation that the house itself is such a profoundly strange place that it imparts some altered mental state on its inhabitants.

But it may not have been the house, or not entirely the house. The title of the movie comes directly from a dream: one that the main character's friend has about a menacing figure that he somehow knows has "the face of a dog and a pig" although its face is covered, and he also somehow knows that this figure is called "the Bloodhound". He describes it as coming from the sewers, picking out houses along the sewer line, crawling into them, and hiding in the closet, causing an inexplicable deep fear in the people who live in the house until they are so afraid that they're forced to reckon with each other and become closer as a result. This isn't a 1:1 explanation of all that happens in the film, but the actual presence of the Bloodhound- who is deeply, deeply disturbing- makes it hard to ignore that a lot of what we see tracks with the way the protagonist's friend describes his unsettling dream.

I absolutely loved this movie- it's something totally unique, something that's hard to quantify but still feels like it makes some absurd kind of sense. It's not scary in any sort of typical way that I can describe to you neatly, but it has a heavy feeling of ominousness over every minute of its very short running time. The set decoration creates a stifling atmosphere in a house that could be a perfectly habitable place in different lighting, and the stilted, uncomfortable exchanges between the two characters culminating in an ending as mysterious as everything that came before it makes this feel impenetrable, in the best way.