Dogman (2018)

Matteo Garrone's Dogman arrives at the examination table as a grim Neapolitan character study: Marcello, a mild dog groomer, submits to a hulking former boxer named Simone, and the arrangement ends in a dog cage and a metal bar. What follows is our customary audit, and the results are unusually tidy. The cast is entirely Italian, a natural consequence of a story set in Castel Volturno, and we record this without ceremony as a zero. There is no diversity initiative to be found, and none is pretending to be there.

The remaining columns empty out with the same quiet efficiency. No LGBTQ+ thread surfaces in this world of petty cocaine sales and bruised locals. No racial argument is made; the conflicts are intra-community and economic. The dilapidated beach settlement supplies atmosphere, not an environmental thesis. Poverty here is lived fact, not an eat-the-rich parable. No body-positivity theme appears, since the film's physicality is spent on menace and vulnerability. No neurodivergent character arrives to widen the frame. Alida, the ex-wife, and Simone's mother occupy their narrative stations without commentary attached, and Garrone declines to supply any.

We are told the film was inspired by real events, which normally opens the door to a history lesson. It does not here. The film makes no revisionist argument and offers no moralizing coda. It is tight, unsentimental, and preachy in no direction at all. A clean zero, then, and a rare one: a serious film about cruelty that trusts us to draw our own conclusions. We note it with something close to gratitude.