We begin with testicles—titan-sized testicles yanked clean from the pelvis of a slumbering devil by a wandering man in chains. That opening is metal AF and unforgettable, and just about par for the course across this rotoscopic animated film by brother filmmakers Lauris and Raitis Abele—a gloomy squall of flesh, faith, and fucking that harkens back to the gory, glory days of Heavy Metal magazine and adult fantasy animation of the 1980s.
In the 17th century, an unholy darkness grips the Livonian village of Zaube. Domineering local pastor Bukholcs (Regnars Vaivars), with the help of his lame, acquiescent adoptive son and servant, Klibi (Jurgis Spulenieks), tries to lead his flock down a path of righteousness, but standing in his way is the people’s reliance on local alchemist and tavern maid Neze (Agate Krista). After the theft of a holy relic from his bedroom, Bukholcs accuses Neze of witchcraft, sending her to trial, which is interrupted by Thiess (Einars Repse), a wildman claiming to be a werewolf, and whose influence will lead Zaube down a path to liberation or ruin.
Gints Zilbalodis’s Flow put Latvian animation on the map (and won the country its first Oscar) with its story of the tenacity and benevolence of nature in a post-human world healing from climate disaster. Dog of God couldn’t feel more opposite: an old-world human fable drawn from Baltic myth, full of blood and boils and semen and the terror of all things earthly, told from the myopic perspective of superstitious men aquiver in the shadow of awesome supernatural power.
Taking inspiration from the 1692 trial of Thiess of Kaltenbrun, the Abele brothers reimagine the werewolf myth as one of spiritual transformation and the reclamation of the region’s folklore rather than monstrous physical change, staging a war between religious hypocrisy and hedonistic sexuality that calls to mind Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring and Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov’s Viy. As a film about witchcraft, there’s no shortage of the divine feminine on screen, but the filmmakers are uniquely focused on all things raunchy and phallocentric. Dog of God is about men, their private parts, and the pitiable fragility of both.
Uncannily expressive, intensely violent, and perversely funny, Dog of God proves the Abele brothers to be worthy inheritors to the mantle of the fantastically dirty-minded rotoscope visions of Ralph Bakshi, from Wizards to Cool World. And they’re confident enough in their vision to reference the master directly: The eagle-eyed will notice Darkwolf from Bakshi’s own sword-and-sorcery opus Fire and Ice in the background of one scene.
The directors shot the highly choreographed movements of their actors on blue screen before animating over them, and though computer animated rotoscoping will always be something of a far cry from hand-drawn animation, Dog of God has style to spare. With highly expressive character models, silhouettes set against pale orange skies, yellow eyes glowing like lamplights in shifting black human masses, and borderline psychedelic sequences of wanton sexuality and folkish horror, Dog of God is an bewitching and grotesque visual feast that wears its influence on its blood-and-shit-flecked sleeve but doesn’t need them as a crutch.
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