Dog of God (Dieva suns) had its world première at Tribeca 2025, 6 June
Dog of God (Dieva suns) may be set in a small village in Livonia at a time when the country was a Swedish dominion, but this rural backwater is in fact a microcosm. For the two institutions that dominate it are opposed yet parallel: the secular, sinful tavern where residents go to drink; and the holy church, where they also go to drink (bringing their own booze to supplement the communion wine). They receive similarly apocalyptic prophecies in both. This village accommodates pagan practices alongside Christian dogma, has new exotic imports neighbouring local traditions, and places superstition next to enlightenment. There is even, taking communion with the rest of the church’s congregation, a man (Armands Bergis) whose small moustache and combed hair are unmistakably, if anachronistically, modelled on the appearance of Adolf Hitler.
Evil lurks here in many forms, along with a pervasive sense of sterility and doom. The rain is constant, the crops are failing, plague is circling, there is a dead dog rotting in the road, Baron Klodt (Kristian Karelins) – a modernist in this otherwise backward place – is impotent and unable to sire a male heir. “Something dark is coming,” warns a Gypsy fortuneteller, summarising this whole situation – or as a young lad observes less portentously but in an otherwise similar spirit: “Everything’s fucked, it’s all going to shit.” These are words to which even today’s viewers, caught in our own culture wars and sense of an approaching end, can easily relate.
The hardline yet hypocritical priest Bukholcs (Regnars Vaivars) preaches abstinence and self-control, while struggling to keep his own masturbatory desires in check, and when he is not flagellating himself to exorcise his sense of guilt and shame, he reserves the rest of his contemptuous ire for Klibis (Jurgos Spulenieks), the boy in his care whom he treats like a dog, and for the barmaid-cum-healer-cum-alchemist Néze (Agate Krista) after whom he secretly lusts. When his treasured relic the Holy Straw goes missing, Bokholcs frames Néze as both thief and witch, and easily riles up the community against her.
Meanwhile a sacred object of a rather different kind – a giant pair of the Devil’s own testicles – finds its way into town, bringing much-needed fecundity. With them appears Thiess (Einars Repse), an old man claiming to be a werewolf and the ‘dog of god’, who can instantly see that Néze is no witch, but recognises others in the village as infernal. After all, Thiess has been to hell, indeed has just come back from there, and knows exactly who cavorts with the Devil. Thiess’ meek, mysterious interventions, naturally coupled with Néze’s vengeful resourcefulness, will visit upon the village a long night of abandon when every repressed appetite is at last let off the leash.
Co-writing with Harijs Grundmanis, brothers Lauris and Raitis Ābele have crafted a weird merger of Latvian history and folk fantasy, all presented in beautifully lysergic rotoscoping. Dog of God is a bawdy, transgressive fairytale for adults, and while devils and the divine are never far away, this is an earthy world of the corporeal and the carnal, full of shit and piss and farts. Here cat’s arses are kissed, here snakes are more than just snakes, here the Baron quotes improbably from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983) as he tries to compensate for his lack of sexual stamina by over-stuffing his wife (Madara Medi) with luxurious foods (including “an English dessert, a wafer-thin mint”), and parades a veritable Kama Sutra of sexual positions with her once Néze’a Viagra-like distillation allows him finally, gleefully and repeatedly to get it on.
Meanwhile there is magic afoot, as the secretions of toads are smoked, mushrooms are imbibed, and even the most righteous and civilised easily fall prey to the beast – or at least to their own bestial impulses. The film’s exquisite animation looks back to the dark adult fantasy worlds of René Laloux‘s Fantastic Planet (1973), Les Maitres du Temps, (1982) and Gandahar (1987), of Ralph Bakshi‘s Wizards (1977), The Lord of the Rings (1978) and Fire and Ice (1983), of Gerald Potterton’s Heavy Metal (1981), and of Philip Gelatt & Morgan Galen King’s lovingly retro-styled The Spine of Night (2021), while Lauris Ābele’s synth score evokes those films’ now bygone age of filmmaking. Yet the closest analogue to the ribald, carnivalesque tone of Dog of God is Rainer Sarnet’s anarchic folk horror November (2017), which similarly unearths all the most bizarre beliefs and lore from its historical, parochial setting, yielding up something absurdly rich and strange.
While Thiess may, even in his own time, be something of a dinosaur and long due his retirement, he finds a way for his hell-raising deeds to carry on into the future. For as the Baron discovers, even the most infertile and impotent should never lose hope of being able to produce an heir – and while Klibis loses his true father, he gains a better one, and becomes part of a cycling mythic succession that, even with this very film, the Ābele brothers are continuing to pass down to our own times. After all, it is always possible for the forces of darkness and oppression to be defeated by liberty, rebellion and not a little licentiousness, and for big-balled fertility, like the seasons, to return.
Over the closing credits of Dog of God, an animated pooch is seen enthusiastically licking its own balls – and indeed this rabble-rousing, rambunctious romp is, as we say in the United Kingdom, the dog’s bollocks.
strap: Lauris and Raitis Ābele’s lysergic folk horror is a rotoscoped, rabble-rousing, rambunctious romp through history and fantasy
© Anton Bitel
