Puppy is a new Australian film from writer/director Kieran Galvin about two people who fall in love in a strange set of circumstances. We were lucky enough to watch the premiere of Puppy at the Regent Cinema. The director, producer, main cast and other members of the film crew were in the audience on the night.
Liz (Nadia Townsend) is rather calamitous, and her life is pretty screwed. To begin with, she runs over her sister’s dog, steals her sister’s necklace to pay for the vet to operate on the dog (the dog dies anyway), and then she is kicked out of her sister’s and her sister’s partner’s flat. We then find out that years earlier she watched as her slow minded brother killed himself by jumping off a rooftop carpark when he was trying to fly. Now Liz just wants to die, so she tries to gas herself in her car. But even this fails. Later in the film she tells us she wasn’t really trying to kill herself, but the fact is, she would have unless Aiden (Bernard Curry) had "saved" her.
We quickly learn that Aiden is highly delusional. He mistakes Liz for his wife (who’s left him). Aiden rescues Liz from her exhaust filled car and drives her off in his truck to his house in the countryside. He ties Liz to the bed, puts a dog collar on her and keeps her on a rope whenever she’s not tied to the bed. Slowly, he begins to trust that Liz won’t try to escape, and lets her walk about the house freely.
Of course, Liz does try to escape when Aiden goes out, but she’s stopped by Aiden’s two fierce dogs (I’m sure most people would have risked escape, anyway.). She later tricks Aiden into calling the local doctor, who comes to the house but then keels over and dies of a heart attack. Then, after managing to overcome Aiden by partially strangling him, she kills one of his dogs and tries to drive the truck away, but being rather prone to disaster, Liz merely manages to back the truck into a shed and gets it stuck.
Having tied Aiden to the bed, Liz feeds him the medication he’s been desparately in need of. Aiden undergoes a complete transformation as his delusions subside, and he wonders what awful things he might have done to Liz. Around this time, Liz decides to dig a shallow grave for the dead doctor, at which point Aiden’s wife comes to check on him. By this time Liz has grown fond of Aiden. She’s worried that his wife is trying to get him institutionalised. Let’s just say she quickly ends up in the grave with the dead doctor and the dead dog. Eventually, the police become suspicious, first about the missing doctor, and then about Aiden’s missing wife. But they’re very incompetent policemen.
I might have done Puppy a slight injustice by making it seem a little bit sillier than it really was. I did like the film, but not as much as the previous two movies I saw at BIFF this year. While the performances were good (particularly from Bernard Curry), I found some elements of the film totally unbelievable. Poor Liz’s failed attempts at escape moved from the frustrating (which is a totally valid feeling to conjure in the movie audience) to the ridiculous (which is not a feeling at all, and had no place in this film). It’s a good start from first time director Kieran Galvin, but his best is surely yet to come.
