Black Dog: enigmatic Chinese drama tells a story of loss, redemption and canine love

Guan Hu made his debut feature, Dirt, in 1994, a profile of the ramshackle, rebellious rock scene of 90s Beijing. It seems fitting, then, that – 30 years later – he has made a film about a former rock star trying to pick up the pieces. The melancholic crime drama Black Dog is a muted affair, in every sense. Its Gobi Desert setting is all dusky greys and sandy whites, shot in punishing widescreen. The directorial tone feels characteristic of a once-brash iconoclast settling into middle age. And its protagonist, Lang, a former local celebrity chastened by a jail sentence for manslaughter, speaks scarcely two dozen words in the entire film.

Black Dog opens with Lang’s homecoming – not that there is much to return to in his deserted, post-industrial town. Half the buildings are empty or marked for demolition, left behind by former locals who have gone off looking for greener pastures. In their wake, dozens of forsaken dogs roam the streets, regarded as a nuisance by the authorities. Lang joins a dog-catching crew to make some extra money and because it’s a parole requirement, but he finds that it is a corrupt racket, abusing its quasi-official status to take dogs from their owners and sell them on the black market.

Lang, with his stoic demeanour, is a little like Meursault, the protagonist of Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1942), scorned for his simple refusal to participate in social convention. But he is also a little like Buster Keaton, facing a darkly comic array of absurdities – a travelling circus, a motorbike stunt, a kidnapping by a snake butcher – with deadpan resignation. These slapstick asides often centre on the black dog of the title, a mangy whippet-like mongrel who takes a disarming liking to Lang. Lang is slow to reciprocate at first, hardened against such pure affection by prison and privation, but eventually he forms a profound, life-affirming bond with his canine companion.

The cloying-sounding narrative arc belies the film’s ambivalent, enigmatic quality – this isn’t Lassie Come Home (1943). Throughout, Guan mixes apparently contradictory visual styles, moving between the vast landscapes of a western and the shadowy claustrophobia of a noir, to tell a story that is both sternly satirical and deftly playful. With its drifter protagonist and 2008 period setting, the film Black Dog most closely resembles is perhaps Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008), another austere portrait of abandoned small town life at a time of financial crisis and gaping inequality. Guan’s film, like Reichardt’s, is a bittersweet acknowledgement that the love between a dog and a human can heal, but it cannot save the world.

► Black Dog is in UK cinemas now.