QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The word of Peacher Scott Larson (Morgan Derera) is to round up and kill all dogs. He calls them big bad rodents and hammers into the community the necessity for the violent cleansing. Entering this strange milieu on the Canadian praries is Korean native Sonny, a skilled hunter and animal-whisperer. After the death of his wife, he has emigrated with his his teenage son Hajoon (Da-Nu Nam) and young daughter Hana (Sein Jin) to Canada.

His hunting prowess and special relationship with animals, as well as his tragedy, ingratiates himself with Scott and his wife, Laura (Candyce Weir). Sonny, however, is disappointed and frustrated with Hajoon’s failure to mimic his own representation of masculine strength. Meanwhile, Hana struggles to understand her mother’s passing, and she watches and listens to her father’s grief, who has conversations with his late wife.

The surreal premise of dogs being exterminated has its roots in the pursuit of power and control. The so-called rodents are a boogeyman that Larson can weaponise to manipulate and control. And of course, the community is united around their shared fear that begs the question how this defines Larson and his tribe? Mongrels, however, is left with unanswered questions because this central premise is reduced to a Trojan Horse that smuggles in the film’s true thematic interests of grief, family and belonging, behind the unsuspecting backs of its audience. Or is it a reflection of how the audience will grasp onto plot details and begin constructing their own version of the film? Is it symbolic of the competition for control between the director and their audience?

One cannot help but question why this unique selling point of man’s violence against canines was pared back so dramatically? It takes courage and conviction to jettison an idea that offers an opportunity for a powerful and lasting impression. Should audiences not remember the film, they’re unlikely to forget this premise, much like Sam Fuller’s racist canine in White Dog (1982).

The premise is part of a broader story told across three chapters (God, Cowboy and Blonde), and Yoo sees it as a way to create a specific energy or vibe, in the same way that the locals wear cowboy hats, far from their iconographic homeland of the American West and now places like Texas. In hindsight, it occurs to me that Yoo treats storytelling like a chef preparing a meal – combining flavours to create the taste of the dish. The ideological violence against dogs, the cowboy hats, and the Korean migrants create a series of clashes, which release a specific sensibility or sense of feeling. The individual flavour of each ingredient isn’t important, it’s how the different ingredients compliment one another.

Mongrels, however, refuses to conform. The familial drama of the grieving family, the tensions between Sonny and Hajoon, the intimate and sensitive relationship between the siblings who depend on one another feels restrained. It could be misconstrued as an indecisiveness by Yoo to take the film by the scruff of the neck. Neither the father and son’s relationship or Hajoon’s coming of age asserts itself. It suggests the pivot away from the man versus canine conceit was the beginning of a trend. Mongrels wants to be everything at once, and to all intent and purposes is successful, but this isn’t achieved without a lingering tension.

The friction we instinctively sense is rooted in the way we emotionally feel our way through a film. Mongrels is neither a family nor a coming-of-age story. If Yoo were to put Sonny front and centre, then it would be a family story, or if he were to put Hajoon front and centre, it would be a coming of age. However, each of the three chapters (God, Cowboy and Blonde), that shifts from Sonny to Hajoon to Hana, are all part of the same thematic journey. The premise itself is not abandoned, instead it is folded into the narrative, and is an instigator for the fracturing of Sonny and his son’s relationship. It should be viewed as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back – provoking the underlying tensions to reach breaking point.

This is a richly layered film, which almost runs the risk of being cluttered. The three chapters shift from father, to son, to daughter, and they feel so closely interrelated that it’s a contributing factor to the film’s aforementioned friction. This aside, Yoo tells a story about the immigrant experience from the points-of-view of different generations and the conflict it provokes. The narrative is also a critique of the class system and transactional human relationships, or as Sonny says to Hajoon, it’s about the chains of self-interest, or preservation.

Yoo’s feature debut is a coherently told story that isn’t afraid to “feel” different by making clearly defined narrative and thematic choices. What Yoo understands is that some films need to explain themselves, while the purpose of other films is to be a conversation starter. Mongrels is the latter. A movie that empowers its audience.

Mongrels is in the First Feature Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.