A Spectral Land of Trauma and Resistance
A dead-silent family car drive, the hush interrupted only by the little daughter’s singing in the back seat. Sitting by her side, one of her two siblings is nervously looking out of the window, oozing a sense of undetermined anxiousness, as if witnessing the outside world through the prism of a vaguely implied Otherness. Suddenly, the car comes to a halt and the father’s gestures signal the boy to step out of the vehicle. Abandoned by the side of the road, with no explanation whatsoever, the boy impassively watches his family desert him, whilst a distant and indiscernible howling can barely be heard from afar. Right from the start, A House With Two Dogs (Una casa con dos perros) immerses us in a whirlpool of eeriness, heralding distorted scenery that travels deeper than what meets the eye.
Alluding at an initial level to the 2001 financial crisis that heavily battered Argentina but, in reality, echoing a timeless and still boiling status of social unrest, this mystically charged debut film by Matías Ferreyra deploys family and childhood as a twofold symbolism: the reformation/crumbling of the former’s structure echoes the dismantled foundation of an entire country, whereas the latter’s powers of transformation, purity of glance, and escapism are activated to counterbalance an unutterable trauma matched by a forced and abrasive coming-of-age. The displacement of a five-member family carrying the burden of a (wisely undisclosed) recent falling-out feels like a sluggish and unwilling repatriation to an imaginary land of nothingness and an out-of-time present.
Masterfully dilating and contracting half-lit rooms and corridors, the film endows all interior spaces with an undulant fluidity, transmuting the closed circuit of a house into a disorientating maze of unseen (yet not at all hidden) passageways, thresholds, niches, and nooks, as a (first) playful reference to the qualities of the cinematic medium itself. In A House With Two Dogs, cinema is reaffirmed as a spectral topos of ghostly apparitions, puzzling disappearances, oracular visions, and fragmented reflections of the uncanny. Not by coincidence, therefore, plenty of sequences kick off with an abrupt waking up as if everything that takes place within these volatile yet restrictive walls is caught in a state of dreamlike limbo, carried out by sleepwalking characters leading elusive lives.
This lethargic ambiance provides the ideal setting for crafting an intricate universe that abides by its innate rules and intertwines touches of reassuring tenderness, complicated family dynamics, hues of horror, and underlying battles for private space (both literal and symbolic). At the same time, the external world/context seems to have vanished into thin air, if it existed at all in the first place, except for the mediated reintroduction of a brutal realism: the TV coverage of public manifestations of rage and impoverishment pops up like an uninvited reverberation of imminent havoc and derailment.
Amidst this web of insinuated secrets, unspoken desires, and muffled thoughts, an improbable and low-key alliance is formed between the ones blessed with the gift of seeing behind the veil of reason and reality; a truly subtle homage not only to the cosmogonic power of the cinema gaze but also to the Latin American cultural legacy of the penumbral coexistence between the otherworldly and the tangible, the dead and the living. A grandmother, at once creepy and comforting, and a cross-dressing grandchild striving to break free from a deranged and bleak entourage are forever bound together through the recurring motif of a missing (dead?) dog that becomes constantly present by the means of its absence. Matías Ferreyra’s film fosters a discreet and kind uprising against the norms of resignation and uniformity.
Georgios Papadimitriou
Edited by Robert Horton
©FIPRESCI 2025