End of Watch and Suicide Squad director David Ayer brings us Heart of the Beast, a tale of one man and his dog’s fight for survival amidst a harsh and hostile wilderness.
Brad Pitt stars as James Belmont, a wounded and weary ex-Special Forces officer, recently retired after thirty-odd years in the field, but it’s his canine companion Odin who carries the whole film on his furry little back. This loyal German Shepherd was practically his second in-command while the pair served in the Army – never leaving his side – and their bond, as the film’s tag-line advertises, will be the key to getting out of this next predicament alive.
‘Alright. Odi, whaddaya say we go find some trouble?’
Some seasons on from their retirement, James and Odin have seemingly retreated into the Alaskan mountains for some peace and quiet. Hey, it worked for The Simpsons, and I feel like a fair shake of Americans, especially, wouldn’t mind the opportunity to go off the grid for a while in the current climate.
Cruising around the snowy landscape and skimming the tops of clouds in their seaplane (another Cessna, in another in a line of eerie similarities with last month’s Dog Stars!), the pair seem quite content to fish, camp and crack open ice-cold brewskies by the lake, though both seem haunted by nightmares of their time in the Forces, particularly poor Odin.
A chance encounter with a stranger in the woods sees the two prick their ears up, but J.K. Simmons’ Watkins is little more than a friendly face and an outdoorsy enthusiast, spending his own retirement kayaking. His brief stopover with our central duo is really the only conversational scene in the whole film, given how much of the runtime is dedicated to the pair simply playing off of each other – James lending kind words; Odin a reassuring paw – but that isolation is crucial to the sense of danger and looming threat that just the terrain itself can bring.
Soon after parting with Watkins, James passes out in the cockpit for reasons that aren’t immediately clear, and suddenly the plane, James and Odin all find themselves slap bang in the middle of nowhere, the very ‘Heart of the Beast’ as their big-bearded guide called it. James’ map of the area puts them roughly sixty miles out from safety, and he and Odin must now cobble together what they can from the wreck and begin an arduous journey through the wild to get there.
Given the nature of trailers – their being short and to the point – the marketing for Heart of the Beast pitched it as an action thriller, similar (again) to Ridley Scott’s Dog Stars. As was the case with that film, which again holds such shared DNA – a traumatised recluse traversing through the wilderness with just a crashed plane and his trusty pup for company – this is really a much slower and introspective movie than you might expect. I enjoyed this more than Dog Stars, but that introspection is hard to really show when Pitt is the only true human presence in ninety-percent of the film.
We frequently cut back to flashbacks of the war – his wiped-out regiment’s desert operations obviously lingering in James’ thoughts – and while they’re interestingly shown to us, realistically choppy and warped rather than just playing out in earnest, their inclusion doesn’t fully let us into James’ psyche outside of showing us how much he misses his boys. I imagine there were conversations behind the scenes about how much of that history ought to be explored, and I think they made the right call in focusing far more on everything going on in the present with Odin, but perhaps we could have used what time we do get more effectively than what’s on offer here.
Given that focus on Odin, it’s fantastic that the filmmakers managed to track down such capable dogs to play the role – four overall, with New Zealand local Uber as the ‘hero’ pooch. The four of them are credited as ‘Odin’ in the film’s credits and it’s hard to highlight which dog played which part, to the point where if you’d told me that they only got one for the job, I wouldn’t have been able to tell otherwise.
I feel like we all understand that dogs are some of the most emotionally attuned animals on the planet, often more so than what we as humans can cobble together. Their capacity for empathy is remarkable, and that same ability makes Odin just brilliant to watch, to the extent that that enjoyment really holds the film together. Pitt’s performance is certainly solid – he sells that crucial relationship between James and Odin well, and the throughline of the pair caring for one another in their own way is touching – but it’s Odin’s movie more than his, as Pitt himself has admitted in promos.
The film’s wilderness sequences, shot against that tried and tested, beautiful backdrop of New Zealand, serve the scale of the threat effectively, especially in first-act wide shots that are silent but for the caws of the birds or the rushing of distant winds. The score, too, has a sense of foreboding to it early on, before the pair’s chances of survival (like their plane) plunge dramatically.
It was the foley work, though, that had me impressed across the board. The central journey pits James and Odin against all manner of trials and tribulations, often ending in some kind of bone-crunching injury for someone, and the grisly sounds of each smack or snap had me wincing throughout. The idea of man (and dog) against nature, pushing through to the bitter end, is a strong central idea and while there were certainly longueurs along the way, and things didn’t quite reach the emotional cap-off I might’ve liked, this was still a touching story of the pair’s unbreakable bond.
BBFC: Rated 12A for moderate injury detail, threat, violence, language.
Heart of the Beast is in cinemas now.
