There are 200 dogs in this film, but only one went home with the star

There are few landscapes more bleakly spectacular than the Gobi Desert in northern China, a chilly expanse of rolling steppes populated by a sprinkling of diehard outlanders and, according to Guan Hu’s film Black Dog, a horde of stray animals. In the opening scene, dozens of dogs descend on a bus that is shaking its way along a stony mule track, sending the confounded driver clunking into a ditch. Only when the dogs disperse do the passengers emerge, unhurt but shaken, as the great silence of the desert returns.

Guan, 55, has established a solid career out of spectacle in such state-sponsored prestige works as war epics The Eight Hundred and The Sacrifice, both of which were box-office smashes in 2020. In Black Dog, however, he uses his vast vistas in an entirely different way; it is a story grounded in quiet, with a hero who can barely find a word to say to anyone but his canine soulmate, a skinny creature suspected by the local dog-catching gang of being rabid.

Lang, played against type by Taiwanese heartthrob Eddie Peng, is on the stranded bus back to his home town after serving 10 years in prison for murder. He killed a son of local gangster Butcher Hu, who is still out for vengeance. Lang used to be a rock star as well as a motorcycle stunt rider: two glamour jobs in a place notably short on glamour. Peng himself is a full-throttle celebrity in China but, as Lang, he is morose and almost wordless.

“The character is based on reality,” says Guan. “Many people who have spent that time in prison develop a form of aphasia, struggling to catch up with society and becoming less talkative. Another aspect of the film is the communication between humans and animals, where the only thing unnecessary is language. From the start, I felt that Lang didn’t need to speak.”

Lang is also a mythological archetype: Chinese audiences will recognise him as the Erlang god Yang Jian, who wanders the Earth with a skinny dog by his side. Peng’s performance, never less than compelling, does suggest a tainted god fell to Earth.

As for the setting, Guan says he nursed the idea of making a film among the Gobi’s rocks and sand for decades.

“A long time ago, I was scouting locations for a film and came to the north-west. I thought it was so beautiful that I absolutely had to make a film related to this place,” he says. With his cinematographer, Weizhe Gao, he established a shooting style that avoided close-ups; they would observe, as it were, from afar.

“It’s about choosing between the smallness of humans and the vastness of nature,” says Guan. “We chose this landscape to emphasise the insignificance of the individual in the grand scheme of things.”

Lang eventually arrives at an unnamed town that is under deconstruction, its crumbling concrete being gradually bulldozed to make way for an industrial hub in keeping with a new, thrusting China. The year is 2008, remembered both for a solar eclipse and the Beijing Olympics. “That was an extraordinary year for the Chinese people, an important year, that gives the story a unique, extraordinary energy,” says Guan.

It doesn’t seem especially propitious for Lang, however. He slips back into his family home. His father is steadily drinking himself to death as the sole remaining keeper at the local zoo, a dreadful prison for demoralised carnivores that nobody visits. Lang watches him from a pergola on top of a hill, unable to muster the will to speak to him.

Meanwhile, dogs circulate, scavenge and occasionally fight; as people have been relocated, the canines have taken over. What remains of the municipality has, however, found funds to get rid of them; the black dog of the title, elusive and ferocious, even has a price on his head.

Lang gets a job as a dog catcher, his eye on that prize, but the chase ends with the two of them spending a night in the freezing desert, clinging together for survival. Lang has been bitten, but it doesn’t matter. He resolves to spend a week in isolation with this strange dog. If he doesn’t develop rabies, they will be together for good.

It was the COVID lockdown, Guan says, that gave him the space to return to his earlier style of arthouse filmmaking. It also gave him the inspiration to make a film about dogs; he shared his pandemic experience with his three dogs, growing closer to them in the process.

“I would sit in the yard, and my big dog would accompany me every day,” he says. “It was just like being with a lover – his eyes were so beautiful, those big, soulful, watery eyes. He would just stare at me, sometimes for three hours straight.

“The power of that companionship is very strong. When you’re feeling frustrated, lonely or tired, it gives you warmth and strength. In our film, two very lonely souls come together, support each other, rescue each other and warm each other. It’s a story of rebirth.” He always saw the film as having two lead actors: one human, one canine.

Directors sometimes complain that filming around one dog is too tricky. Guan had 200 of them. By good fortune, he had met a team of 30 dog handlers who, he says, constitute the first company in China to specialise in providing animal performers for film. They took 130 of their dogs to the film; 50 more were recruited and trained on the set.

Many of these former strays were later adopted by crew members; Peng charmed all of China when he took his screen bro Black Dog – actually a bitch called Xiao Xin, playing a male – home with him. Xiao Xin was local talent, selected after an exhaustive series of auditions. “Just like people, dogs have their own personalities,” Guan says. “Xiao Xin has qualities like challenge, bravery and a bit of defiance, which fit perfectly with the character’s traits.”

Black Dog has been described by critics as a kind of western, in which a stranger comes to town and, by sheer force of personality, changes everything. Like many modern westerns, it also has a deadpan humour and a sense of deeper truths folded into its unvarnished documentary finish.

“I didn’t intentionally set out to make a western,” Guan says. “But if I had to trace a connection, I’d say it’s probably linked to the long-term influence of the movies I’ve watched.” Sergio Leone, for example, has been a longstanding touchstone.

Certainly, the dogs and the zoo animals, which will soon be released to fend for themselves in the wilderness, play both themselves in the real world and, like cowboys, are mythical symbols of freedom.

“Most people bind themselves,” says Guan. “As they grow older, with increasing social pressures and the roles they play in society, they end up restricting their own hearts and minds. From the perspective of filmmaking, literature or painting, people always hope to break free and create something that represents a wild, untamed soul.”

We want to reach for the sky, he adds. So it is with humans. So it is, here at least, with dogs.

Black Dog opens on December 12.

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