Dogman (2023)

Luc Besson returns with Dogman, in which Caleb Landry Jones plays a paraplegic man who performs in drag at a cabaret, memorizes Shakespeare, and commands a pack of dogs to burgle the homes of the affluent. It premiered at Venice, drew mixed notices from the press, and has since found a warmer reception among audiences than among critics. That split tells us less about the film's quality than about its sheer strangeness.

The picture carries a modest charge of social consciousness, distributed unevenly. Doug's cabaret act gestures at queer performance culture, though the film treats it as atmosphere and never as identity. Jojo T. Gibbs occupies the pivotal role of the psychiatrist Evelyn, a competent professional and the story's framing device, and her presence lends the mostly white European ensemble a measure of diversity that the screenplay never acknowledges. Race goes unmentioned throughout. Doug's campaign against the wealthy, sending his animals into the homes of the comfortable to steal their jewelry, offers a faint rob the rich undercurrent, but the motive is personal vengeance, not systemic argument. His disability registers as trauma and plot machinery, never as a subject in its own right.

The remaining markers sit near silence. There is no environmental messaging, no historical revisionism, no engagement with neurodivergence, since Doug's Shakespeare recitations and social alienation read plainly as the residue of abuse. The film's themes of exclusion and animal loyalty arrive through melodrama and sudden violence, not through sermonizing, which keeps the preaching to a minimum. What we are left with is a curious artifact: a violent, somber fable that occasionally brushes against contemporary sensibilities without ever committing to them. Besson has made a film about a broken man and his dogs, and it remains, stubbornly, about little else.