WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON HEART OF THE BEAST?
Lassie. Rin Tin Tin. Benji. Uggie from The Artist. Good dogs, the lot of them. But in this cinematic day and age, no dog is surely more good than Uber, the former search-and-rescue German Shepherd who leaps to stardom in director David Ayer’s Heart of the Beast, wherein he gives his human co-star Brad Pitt a run for his money with his effortless charisma and magnetic screen presence. In dog years, Uber might as well be the Robert De Niro or Al Pacino of canine movie actors, which is no small feat for someone making their first-ever movie appearance.
It helps to know that Heart of the Beast is also by far the best film in years by Ayer, a filmmaker who for at least the past decade has been saddled with the kind of slop that dogs like Uber would just wolf down without hesitation. But here, with a film that is certainly his best since 2014’s Fury (funnily enough, another war-related drama starring Brad Pitt), the director actually gets to bring a genuine sense of nuance and gravitas to a simple and somewhat familiar survival story that is told with aplomb as well as emotion that can be genuinely gut-wrenching at times.
In the film, Pitt is retired Special Forces officer James Belmont, while Uber is Odin, his former combat dog who’s been left with a prosthetic leg and titanium teeth – as well as heavy bouts of PTSD – from his time on the battlefield. When we meet the duo, they’re just chilling on a trek through the Alaskan landscapes, flying in their little biplane to solitary fly-fishing spots, spotting wild goshawks in the woods, and sharing a brief campfire chat with J.K. Simmons as a fellow retiree that they happen across. But during one ascent through the sky, James suffers a heart attack that forces both man and dog to crash-land deep in the wilderness, and with civilisation just a few days’ walk away, a weakened James and his ever-loyal canine companion must survive the harsh environment and its many dangers if they’re to make it out alive.
It certainly follows the traditional survival movie template, but Heart of the Beast – which Ayer directs from a script by Cameron Alexander – is effective in just how it follows that formula. Ayer’s direction gives the film this bleak and almost post-apocalyptic vibe, as Pitt is the only human we see for the majority of the film with Simmons and Anna Lambe (in another brief but crucial role) only sharing roughly ten minutes of screentime between them, which makes it feel like we’re watching the last man alive – and his little dog, too – try not to succumb to the bitter wrath of nature. Not only does it make things less certain, especially as Pitt’s character becomes more and more depleted over the journey due to his fragile heart, but because we really do grow to know and love the relationship between this man-and-dog pair, the emotional stakes are raised so much higher, further investing you in the story and its unforgiving setting. In fact, it makes you wish that The Dog Stars – an actual post-apocalyptic drama featuring a man flying around in a plane with his dog – was this instead of, well, whatever The Dog Stars was.
Unlike that film, Heart of the Beast is very well-paced, as Ayer manages to fit as much detail about these central characters as possible without it feeling like filler, while keeping the story going at a sturdy flow as Pitt and Uber encounter dangerous river rapids and ferocious wolves, among various other deadly natural resources that are beautifully captured by cinematographer Mauro Fiore. It’s pretty lean as a result, without a trace of fat on its 101-minute runtime, and all the while you are right there alongside this duo as they try and make it through their slightly stripped-down version of The Revenant. There’s even a bear in this film, albeit one that looks more like it wandered from the set of Disney’s live-action Jungle Book, which kind of leads into how the animal effects in this movie are rather iffy and more often than not take you out of the film, especially when Uber himself is briefly CGI’d during a major dramatic scene just so the filmmakers could capture a quick reaction he clearly couldn’t give live on set.
Luckily, that drama is powerful enough to just about forgive the unnecessary effects. In fact, this is an extremely emotional movie where I’ll admit that I did get rather choked up a couple of times, since the film has done such a good job of making you root for these characters that certain moments between them feel well and truly earned. Ayer’s direction and especially the performances by both Pitt and Uber elevate Alexander’s script to the level of poignancy that it’s at, their sharp precision and gentle heartbreak making the situation feel so gut-wrenching whenever life tests them in devastating fashion. Both human and non-human actors convey such emotional strength in even their smallest of inflictions to where it’s genuinely impressive how much chemistry can be generated between them, which the director captures without turning the film into a syrupy and overly manipulative puddle of itself.
Again, this is easily Ayer’s most accomplished film in a while, as Heart of the Beast is something that could so easily have become the very thing described at the end of that last sentence, but it avoids it by actually focusing on the story and its characters, to where its emotional resonance feels so much more natural. Therefore, it is perhaps one of the year’s bigger surprises, as it may not reinvent the survival movie rulebook but it executes the familiar tropes with an earnest passion that is hard to ignore, especially with a rousing canine performance that outshines the actual Oscar-winning A-lister that happens to be his co-star.
