Straw Dogs

Colour, 35 mm
United Kingdom, USA, 1971, 115 min
Section: Tribute to Sam Peckinpah

Synopsis

“Thank you for your comment. I didn’t want you to enjoy the film. I wanted you to look very close at your own soul.” Thus Sam Peckinpah in his reaction to a letter from a viewer outraged by the intense violence depicted in Straw Dogs. The story focuses on American mathematician David (Dustin Hoffman) and his frivolous wife Amy who, while staying at an isolated house in the English countryside, become the object of a brutal attack by enraged villagers. The film represents Peckinpah’s most disturbing study of the violence hidden deep within an otherwise peaceful individual, a violence that surfaces when circumstances force him to fight for his very existence. The director’s study is effective thanks also to the sophisticated use of slow-motion shots and fast cutting, especially in the final delirious attack on the house: lacking the convention of western shootouts, it comes across perhaps a bit too realistically. Straw Dogs excels for its fascinating ability to prevent viewers from maintaining a safe distance from the action and forces them into a sometimes none-too-flattering look within. Even the introductory sequence, when the kids torment a dog (recalling a similar scene at the beginning of The Wild Bunch - i.e. the scorpion and red ants), testifies to the director’s rather sceptical opinion of humanity’s bright tomorrow.