Dog Bite Dog

Cheang Pou-soi showed with New Blood (AFF05) that he is an enormously talented filmmaker interested in pushing popular genres into abstraction. Dog Bite Dog provides a case in point: what begins as a gritty urban cop movie changes into a bizarre Asian myth on the ferocious desperation of human life. Let’s dispense quickly with the story—a Cambodian hitman arrives in Hong Kong and is confronted by his doppelgänger, a rogue cop. However, this is only the start of an unrelenting journey into the heart of a savage vision of the human condition, the cycle of desperation, death and re-birth. Who is to say that this film is not simply a distillation of a contemporary world which has moved beyond dog eat dog, in which millions scavenge daily through rubbish tips and brutality can be the only way to make a living. Cheang confronts us here with a harsh and violent film whose strong virtue is its uncompromising courage rather than its good sense. Be warned that this film contains strong, and very strange, violence.

Forget slickness, forget cleanliness, forget kindness. Dog Bite Dog is like swallowing a handful of broken glass.

Grady Hendrix, Variety