Going underground: "Lek and the Dogs"

The British artist and filmmaker Andrew Kötting continues to scrabble usefully around in the dirt, but his latest Lek and the Dogs comes as a departure from recent impromptu gallivants (Swandown, By Our Selves, Edith Walks) in that its subject matter is that a more conventional documentarist might have seized upon. It takes a while to grasp as much - Kötting is prone to dropping his audience in the middle of nowhere, with scant contextual guidance, to be bombarded by unfamiliar sights and sounds - but this is the director's take on a grim true-life enfant sauvage tale: that of Ivan Mishukov, a young Russian man who, after the breakdown of his family in the 1990s, was found living underground among a pack of stray dogs. Hattie Naylor, credited as co-writer, took up this story in her 2010 play Ivan and the Dogs: Mishukov was coaxed out and resumed a relatively normal life, only to later vanish, reportedly upset by the behaviour of the two-legged beasts he now found himself running with.

If the bare narrative bones recall so many cinematic Kaspar Hausers, both real and fictional, this is the version of this story that only an outlier like Kötting could and would make. It opens with the striking image of a bald, naked figure (performance artist Xavier Tchili, replaying the Lek role he occupied in the Kötting-directed This Filthy Earth and Ivul) galloping on all fours through the desert, then works over this tale - and Naylor's play - with a patchwork of imagery sourced from old science and nature films, newsreel and drone technology. As if this unruly montage wasn't unsettling enough, its images are coupled - if that's the right word - to an ever-shifting soundscape that meshes recordings of Lek's memories of his life as a dog with psychoanalysts discussing his predicament, input from canine behavioural specialists, and even longtime Kötting collaborator Alan Moore, holding forth about time, space and existence in a role the closing credits define as The Wizard.

The recurrence of the word trauma in the testimony would appear to indicate some shift in Kötting's traditionally sunny outlook. A grey, impoverished post-industrial landscape has replaced the leafy green scenery of his previous films; where once this larky nature-boy director set out in search of transcendence, here his aim is to paint a picture of deprivation his subject would surely recognise only too well. As a result, Lek and the Dogs can feel gloomily subterranean. Very different from Gallivant or Swandown, films where the director's lines of thought remained above ground and easily grasped, this one's far from entry-level Kötting, if there ever was such a thing. Instead, Lek is rather more like an abandoned mine you duck into at your own risk, armed with the foreknowledge you will have to stay alert, try not to freak out and, at certain times, really dig in so as to get anything rewarding out of the experience.

It is, nevertheless, studded with eye- and ear-catching ideas that gleam intriguingly once polished and held up to the light. Hard, for one, not to compare the film's crushed and crumpled landscapes to our own, and to wonder whether Kötting sees in the Mishukov legend's pack mentality something of the populism, the entrenched safety in numbers, that has risen up across the globe of late. (Ironically, the film lands on our screens at a moment when liberal democracies appear in abject disarray, while Russia is restored, by fair means or foul, to something like its former pomp.) It does feel like a seethingly political film, whether Kötting means to use Lek's seclusion to get at the atomisation of "societies digging their way into the past", the removal of those structural safety nets that prevent individuals from going to the dogs, or just how the loyalty and empathy of our four-legged friends will forever trump the self-serving motives of men. A bracing watch, either way, anchored by Tchili's physically and emotionally agonised presence: you won't readily return to it, one suspects, but don't be surprised if one or two of its wild howls at the moon come back to haunt you.

Lek and the Dogs is now showing in selected cinemas, and available to stream via MUBI.