Douglas, more typically known as (the) Dogman (Caleb Landry Jones), is arrested by the police while he’s driving a truck full of dogs, wearing a dress drenched in blood. He’s also paraplegic (as it turns out, in a variation readymade for melodrama). In interviews with a police psychiatrist (Jojo T. Gibbs), he starts recounting his peculiar life story, and how it eventually led him to where the film begins.
Caged together with the dogs of his abusive father, he developed and early affinity with the animals that apparently resulted in an ability to speak to dogs so they understand every word he says. Further misadventures eventually find Douglas moving into a proper lair with his gang of dog pound dogs. From there he makes money for dog food by working as a dog-based fixer/vigilante in the Equalizer manner (more Woodward than Washington), and a drag performer in a club. He also has his dog buddies steal jewellery from the houses of the rich. Eventually, the dangers of these combined professions and his general loneliness take their toll. Christ symbolism will be involved.
Most of the films Luc Besson has made in the last decade or so have been terrible - stupid in all the wrong ways and typically lacking in any conviction. Conviction is something DogMan has in spades.
This is a film that carries its inherent weirdness with seriousness and dignity. There’s not a single shot here that suggests Besson thinks the amount of outsider signifiers he’s saddled his protagonist with is a bit silly, no irony, no attempt at distancing himself from the weird and the improbable. Rather, this is a film that looks you straight in the eye and challenges you to take it seriously on exactly the level it has decided on; thus, there’s no weird for weird’s sake freakishness involved here at all, but a sense of a director speaking about things that are actually important to him in a way that’s completely him, utterly unembarrassed.
It succeeds wonderfully, for suddenly, Besson isn’t the hack director going through the motions anymore we’ve known for a while, but again one who uses heightened intensities, realities and stakes as his form of expression, and uses the genre combination of what is situated somewhere between a weird vigilante movie, a curious drama, and an out-there superhero origin story to speak of the feeling of being an outsider, of loneliness, and of the breaks caused by abuse that never heal in a way that feels utterly genuine.
In Jones, Besson has found a congenital partner. There’s a lack of irony and distance in his performance that utterly destroys any possibility to read this as a film about a freak we’re meant to gawk at; in his perfectly unreal and unrealistic surroundings, Jones reaches for simple and clear, yet dramatically heightened, humanity and doesn’t make more of a show out of it than the film he’s in needs. Which is rather a lot, obviously.
That DogMan also contains a couple of dog-based heist sequences which easily beat The Doberman Gang is another point in its favour.