Just past the extinction point of the mid-Nineties heydey of the arthouse succes-de-scandale cycle of blithely shocking special-defects showcases (including but not limited to the works of celluloid carnival barkers Harmony Korine, Todd Solondz, and Larry Clark), Austrian Ulrich Seidl has delivered a queasy masterwork showcasing a genuinely bruising sensibility and capacity enough for idiosyncratic formalism to reaffirm at least this viewer’s faith in the terrible power of the grotesque. Seidl’s reward has been a fraction of the recognition that greeted his sophomoric stateside peers; Dog Days enjoyed a cameo of a New York City theatrical release, garnering critical notices which seemed willing, at most, to acquiesce that the movie, a cinematic catalog of emotional abuse set on the suburban fringe of Vienna’s autobahn loop, was made of pretty pungent stuff.

True, yes, but what makes Dog Days really noteworthy is the opportunity to see a filmmaker of distinct visual imagination turning his eye on a very contemporary and increasingly prominent blandscape of sprawl which has, with unsettling aesthetic uniformity, engulfed the outer suburbs of North America and parts of Western Europe. Specifically, I mean the planned communities of identical, oatmeal-colored middle-class mansions, wastelands of square footage, usually radiating around a man-made lake, riveted into the ground with machine-tool precision, the whole mess serviced by monolitically chunky De Stijilist mega-stores (Biggs, Intermarche, Merkur) and sporting a community name the glows with the suggestion of quasi-rural comfort: Lakeview, Shady Grove, Meadow Crest.

This completely chartered environment is home to a fast-increasing population, yet by and large, the stupefying ugliness of its vistas has sent even those filmmakers ostensibly interested in studying the modern suburban condition backpedaling into gothic atmospherics or picaresque nostalgia, e.g. American Beauty’s dependence on the dusty Fifties storyboard playbook of Bigger Than Life. Seidl, however, has guts and a compositional vocabulary that can suggest Eric Fischl, Wolfgang Tillmans, or Edward Hopper in turns, applied with a head-on ontological precision and a crude, jerky rhythm that’s wholly his.

Alternately excessively nasty, repetitive, and heartbreaking, Dog Days provides a rare vision of our man-made hell lucid enough to warrant the defense provided by Tennessee Williams in his afterword to Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, rebutting to the righteous protest of the “Humanists” against such a protracted wallow in the obscene. “Because a book is short and a man’s life is long,” Williams explains, “...the awfulness has to be compressed.” Come Dog Days’ wax museum-style epilogue of figures dead-frozen in tableaux, stark staring past the camera, you’ll be surprised just how much awfulness two hours can hold.
—NICK PINKERTON