Rarely do you find a film where the director so patently obviously despises all his characters, and seems to think that hate on such a scale makes for social comment. Ensemble pieces of interlocking stories, above all genres, should have a moral centre of some kind to enable the viewer to latch onto whatever point is being made, lest it just all end up as babble.
Dog Days contains none, and its gallery of self-centred Viennese suburban grotesques pointlessly drinking and copulating seems to be making a case for the extinction of the Austrian nation. There's a mentally ill girl who spends the whole film hitching rides with perplexed motorists, an estranged couple who appear to continue living together just to seethe at each other, another woman in a helplessly abusive relationship and a pensioner who loathes his neighbours. Think if Michael Haneke and Werner Herzog had a competition to outdo each other in misanthropy, and it was all edited by a suicidal Finn. Yes, that bad.
Needless to say, it won prizes from those bodies that confuse torturing your audience with depth.
2/10
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