©Courtesy of Tritone Studio
Latvian industry of animation movies seems to be experiencing an artistic moment of grace, to say the least. Following the success of Flow by Gints Zilbalodis, awarded with an Oscar for best animated film, Tribeca Festival 2025 (in the Escape from Tribeca section) presented the powerful Dog of God, directed by Lauris and Raitis Abele.
Set in the 17th century in a small village at the border with Finland, the feature film is a “arthouse” horror that is developed through a style of animation both classic and experimental in its visual solutions, being capable to strike the viewer with a whirlwind of vibrant, sometimes extremely violent images, edited to evoke a sense of bewilderment and oppression that is undoubtedly effective. At the center of the main plot we find a priest who wants to eradicate evil from his small village at any cost, adopting any means necessary. To help him there is a young man, a naive novice looking for his true identity. In the meantime, many citizens seek for pleasure, oblivion or just peace the best way they can. But something terrible, in the shape of an old man with a tattoo on his chest, is coming to the village…
Dog of God plays with horror archetypes: the movie starts with a stunning, powerful sequence that evokes H.P. Lovecraft, but then dares to mix Edgar Allan Poe, witch hunts and religious bigotism, sin and redemption through lust. Long story short, there is almost everything we’ve seen in horror movies in Abele’s animated movie, mixed with an admirable audacity and freedom. Dog of God goes so far as to create a narrative labyrinth that is not always comprehensible but totally fascinating, even in the scenes where it becomes more extreme.
©Courtesy of Tritone Studio
This happens because the rhythm of the storytelling is gripping, and doesn’t allow the audience to take a break from this tour de force set in hell on heart. When we finally arrive at the end of the bloody journey, we can feel that Lauris and Raitis Abele have forced us to experience something that isn’t that easy to experience through horror, let alone animation. The symbolism of many scenes is obscure but taunting, a quality that this genre should always produce in order to intrigue the viewers.
Dog of God works in fact on more than one level: visually is spectacular, bold, uncompromising. On a narrative level it forces you to question what you have seen, and even if you don’t get it, it still remains in your memory for a while. The last fifteen, twenty minutes of Dog of God are a rollercoaster of events that are connected primarily with the strength of images, sound, editing, music. The directors have been capable of building such a wicked and suffocating atmosphere that it is quite impossible to relax in the final sequence. Truly an impressive work of art.
This kind of production will almost certainly not reach the mainstream circuits that Flow has been able to conquer instead, but it remains another striking example of a cinematography that is showing a remarkable artistic revolution. Hopefully Flow and now Dog of God will push the audience to want to know more about the wonderful tradition of East-Europe animation, which in the decades has produced so many dazzling works of art that are absolutely worth (re)discovering.
©Courtesy of Tritone Studio
Rate: B
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Here’s the trailer of the film.