This film was released 19th October 2018, and is no longer screening.

Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah, 2008) creates a brilliantly realised milieu of corruption and decay in the relentlessly gripping and flawlessly acted Dogman.

Mild-mannered Marcello (Marcello Fonte) operates a dog-grooming parlour on the outskirts of a bleak, depressed Italian seaside town. His clients are predominantly petty crooks, yet the physically slight man is surprisingly adept at handling their vicious pets. No innocent, Marcello deals drugs on the side, which has made him a popular fixture in the community and helps pay for the extravagant holidays he brings his doting daughter on. He has, unfortunately, become embroiled in a toxic, co-dependent friendship of sorts with Simoncino (Edoardo Pesce), a violently unpredictable local thug.

Craving companionship, Marcello enables Simoncino’s spiralling drug addiction, and is soon acting as his ineffectual accomplice on robberies with, needles to say, disastrous consequences.

(Notes by David O’Mahony.)

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