By Lauren Hunter (she/her)

Black Dog, the directorial debut of 23-year-old George Jaques, opens in the grimy underworld of South London. It seems that you’re in for an hour and a half of brutality, violence, and ugly realities. You’d be forgiven, then, for not believing that there were audience members openly weeping by the time the end credits rolled.

Nathan (Jamie Flatters) is a rough-around-the-edges teenager who could be on the verge of leading his life down the wrong path. But when he steps in one day to stop the mugging of another boy, Sam (Keenan Munn-Francis), an unlikely connection is formed. Nathan is loud, arrogant, angry; Sam is timid, closed-off, alone. Yet when the pair discover that they’d known each other years previously, and that they are both travelling north out of their city, they embark on a road trip which transpires to reveal more about themselves than they could have ever imagined.

The film is on a constant see-saw between intimate moments of friendship and bonding to jolts of acute darkness and discomfort; it leaves you with a gnawing pit in your stomach that something could go wrong at any time. But ultimately, we come to learn that this is what the boys’ respective lives have felt like all along, with Nathan having lived in foster care most of his life and Sam devastated by mental health issues that he doesn’t feel ready to open up about. As they cross over the Scottish border, there is a parallel commentary on what it means for men to love, be frustrated, and learn about vulnerability.

It’s quite the achievement for Jaques given this is his first feature film. Most importantly, these characters feel believable, whether in Linlithgow or London. They are the men of the next generation, and the film really speaks to the gravity of that when they have already seen the ugly side to the world at such a young age. Oftentimes, however, the darkness doesn’t mesh too well with the light, and the occasional attempts at comedic moments could have been given a greater platform as they mostly fall flat.

Having said that, it does not take away from what is otherwise an extraordinary film. Munn-Francis’s performance in particular is subtly heartbreaking; he is definitely one to watch in the coming years. Appreciation also be given to the quality of cinematography – you wouldn’t imagine that a field out the back of a motorway services would be picturesque, but they somehow make it happen.

In a bleak world of Andrew Tates, Black Dog is a tender portrait of what lies beneath the misunderstood, and about how boys, whose childhoods have been marred by trauma, turn into men. Despite initially presenting so little, it leaves you with so much.