Dogs Don’t Wear Pants — Dogs Don’t Wear Pants(Blu Ray)

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants is a recent Finish film that swings, sometimes haphazardly, between dealing- with-a-loss drama, and a BDSM themed jet black romantic comedy. It’s a film that one moment will be pulling you through fraught emotional loss, the next dipping you down in troubling pain and suffocating obsession, before bringing you up for fleeting breaths of tragic-to-dark humour and wince including horror. Here from Anti-Worlds Releasing those seekers of distinctive/ unusual film and documentaries is a well-deserved Blu Ray release of the film, bringing together a directors commentary and a few other extras.

Dogs Don’t Wear Pants( Koirat eivät käytä housuja) was released in 2019- it’s a Finish/ Latvia production, and was directed and based on a short story by Porvoo, Finland born J.-P. Valkeapää.  Dog Don’t Wear Pants is his second feature-length, appearing after a few shorts and his 2014 feature-length debut They Have Escaped- which is seemingly a symbolism heavy drama.  And I must say it’s a great and accomplished second film- blending together the different genres/ tropes in an inventive-yet- always entertaining-to-shocking manner.
 
The film focuses on Juha( Pekka Strang) a timid and awkward heart surgeon- he lost his wife ten or so years back in a drowning incident and is now trying to balance bringing up his mid-teen daughter Elli (Ilona Huhta), and working in a hospital. Juha is still haunted by his wife's death, he tried to save her but she was tangled in a fishing net, and he nearly died himself trying to save her. One evening he takes his daughter to a tattoo parlour to get her tongue pierced. He’s hanging around looking awkward as the piercer tries to do her job, so he’s told to go elsewhere. He wanders down into the basement of the parlour- here he gets jumped on and nearly suffocated by dominatrix Vaimo/Mona (Ester Geislerová). This meeting has a huge impact on him, and he keeps focusing on the bruisers she caused on his body- so he decides to ring her up, and go for a session in her torture room. After leading him around on a lead naked- she straps him into her chair, puts a bag over his head and starts strangling him- with this, he trips back in his head to the day his wife died, and is at the bottom of the lake tangled in reeds trying to grab his wife who is floating above him. Fairly soon he is visiting Mona every night, but one session things go too far with Juha wanting to hold him under longer- and he nearly dies. At this point, Mona cuts off her services and refuses to talk to Jaha, but he has become obsessed with both the strangulating and Mona herself- this puts his sanity, job, and relationship with his daughter on the line.
 
Pekka is great as the painfully reserved and awkward Juha- really selling shifting from troubled and shy father, onto a man preoccupied with his kink, thorough twitchy stalker, onto been somewhat reborn. Geislerová is also wonderful- switching between been a no-nonsense and brutal stern dominatrix, and a more human/ emotional character. Huhta is effective too as Juha daughter- as she tries to deal with her father's awkwardness and later strange behaviour. The film is scored wonderfully moving between minimal and stark keys, strings and percussion blends, through latter on all out hard-hit dance music. The films tonally shifts are done in a rewarding and often effectively unbalancing manner- as we shift from emotional loss and all that’s connected to that, taut and dangerous encounters, morbidly lulling fansites, moments of coal-black humour, wince-inducing and icky horror. Going into the film I wasn't quite sure what to expect, and I must say I was highly impressed with Dogs Don’t Wear Pants- and the cinematic ride it takes you on, really pulling you through a whole host of emotions.
 
Moving onto this recent region B Blu Ray, and we get a good selection of extras. First up we get a commentary track from director/ writer J.-P. Valkeapää- he starts off a little slow and sparse with his track, but soon gets into his pace giving an informative and interesting track. He moves from talking about the film's shooting, and how he wanted to have two sessions to the film summer and autumn. He goes on to talk about how he selected the actors, commenting on each’s strength and particular scenes they do well or were difficult to film. He discusses more problematic issues with filming underwater, showing the film at different festivals around the work and what the audience thought, talking about writing the script and the touches of humour- that same may get and some may not. So, a most interesting, and well worth a play track. We get three stand-alone/ on-screen interviews with the director, and the two lead actors- these each run between twenty-nine and twenty minutes and are well worth a play. We get an audio-only interview between the directed and respected UK film critic Mark Kermode- this runs fifteen minutes There’s a sixteen-minute camera test, behind the scenes stills, trailer, and the finished release comes with a twenty four-page booklet with new writing about the film/ credits in.
 
 
With this release of Dogs Don’t Wear Pants Anti-Worlds Releasing has once again put out a most wonderfully distinctive and one-off film, really strengthening their brand even more. The extras are on point and most worthy, making for an all-around marvellous release. If you’re looking for a film that will surprise, shock, and emotionally pull you back and forth Dogs Don’t Wear Pants is most certainly for you!. Drop by here to pick up a copy of the Blu ray direct from the folks at Anti-Worlds Releasing.