DogMan: Fascinating Caleb Landry Jones (review)

Between Hamlet and Nikita, Luc Besson portrays a freak ostracized from society. He can especially count on the incredible performance of his main performer.

Besson is back. With what he knows how to do best, namely caress our adolescent fantasies. Dogman is an excessive film. As Nikita or The Fifth Element, this mixture of melodrama destroy and revenge movie paranoid is driven by a mannerist vision which sometimes falls short of the mark, but regularly achieves a strike. When Dogman appears, it is on the asphalt, emerging from carnage. He is covered in blood and glitter, wears a wig that makes him look like Marilyn. Faced with a police psychologist, Doug will then, gradually, confide through flashbacks and tell his tragic story – from his childhood martyr to the drag queen cabaret to the wheelchair…. Narcos who blow up a house, a wild child raised by dogs, a transformer who sings lip sync The crowd by Piaf… And all this in the same film? Don’t look, you’ve never seen this anywhere. But if we have to find the reason for this strange success, we can put forward three words: Caleb Landry Jones. With this extraordinary actor, Besson has found an interpreter who lives up to his regressive visions. The actor adds a new weirdo role to his already well-established CV. Nothing perverse or sulphurous here: CLJ just manages through his intensity to transcend his role as a nice freak and push all the sliders into the red. What we call a real performance.

Of Luc Besson. With Caleb Landry Jones, Christopher Denham, Marisa Berenson… Duration 1h 53. Released September 27, 2023