A review of the excellent Spanish/American horror film Pet
I don’t know about you, but this writer is getting mighty sick of horror/thriller flicks featuring innocent dames taken from their homes by sickos and kept in cages. The thrill is gone, if it was ever there to begin with. Rather, the novelty is gone. It’s been done to death. Earlier this week, we discussed a seemingly forgotten 1981 film called Tattoo in which Bruce Dern’s psychotic tat artist kidnaps the woman he’s obsessed with (Maud Adams) in order to “mark” her. That’s a movie that succeeds on a myriad levels, offering a complex psychological quasi-love story about transformation and redemption. But let’s face it, most of these easy-to-make exploitation chick-in-a-cell pictures are just excuses to perpetuate a male fantasy about controlling femininity, violently, and they mask these impulses under the guise of entertainment. These never-ending sorts of movies tend to be cheap, witless, ugly and mostly just deadly dull.
So with that arguable criticism, I popped in director Carles Torrens’ Pet without knowing much about it. I expected the worst. And I was totally wrong about my suspicions. Because although Pet does indeed start out being exactly the sort of film its title and poster suggests its going to be, it takes a very sharp turn after half an hour and becomes something refreshingly different. It’s a well-directed, well-written and well-acted thriller with a dark sense of humor and dollops of extreme violence. It’s a rather excellent little picture, in fact.
Pet stars Lord of the Rings vet Dominic Monaghan as the twitchy, socially awkward Seth, a nebbish who works at an animal shelter running errands and cleaning cages. He’s not very good at his job. He’s not very good at anything, in fact and he lives a generally quiet, lonely life. That is until he bumps into an old classmate on the bus, a beautiful waitress named Holly (Ksenia Solo) who doesn’t remember him but shows him enough kindness that the usually-ignored Seth locks onto her. Hard. His obsession with the girl amplifies daily and he starts stalking her, trying to glean information about his new muse in order to woo her. After multiple awkward and failed attempts to impress, Seth steals Holly’s diary and soon launches a plan to kidnap the girl and lock her away in the secret, rat-infested tunnels beneath the animal shelter, which he does, imprisoning her in a cage and promising her that he aims not to harm her, but to “save” her.
What gives Pet the edge over similarly-plotted stalk and torture films is just how intelligently made it is. Monaghan offers immaculate work, creating a fringe-dweller who is sad and scary, and, despite his underlying psychological issues, you kind of wish Seth was in a romantic comedy, one where he might just get the girl, as opposed to a grim, violent horror film where you know the sun will never shine. And Solo matches him, delivering a complex portrait of a girl who is seemingly trapped between worlds. When the narrative shifts and both of their true natures are revealed (it’s one helluva twist and we won’t dare reveal it here), they deftly transform those characters, subtly, organically. Credit must go to Jeremy Slater’s script, which is literate and believable, not relying on expletives or expositions but genuine crackling dialogue to progress the plot. And Torrens stylishly puts it all together and, refreshingly, refuses to exploit sex or nudity for the sake of empty thrills. All the moving parts in Pet do so expertly and maturely.
Then there’s the unexpected and revolting blasts of extreme gore, which make perfect sense in the context of the story and are anything but gratuitous.
Ultimately, I’m raving about Pet just because I worry that it might slip by unnoticed or ignored by audiences thinking its one thing, when it’s almost absolutely the opposite. It would be a shame to see such craft vanish into the Walmart dump bins without fanfare…
