Therapy Dogs: A Brash Teen Anti-Yearbook Drama, Shot Undercover In Mississauga
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
Shot undercover at a Cawthra Park high school in the sprawling Toronto suburb of Mississauga, and premiering at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival, Therapy Dogs is fuelled by adolescent angst, fears of mortality, unruly energy, and frustration.
Made over the course of a pre-pandemic school year under the guise of a video yearbook, the film — made by writer/director Ethan Eng, who was only 17 at the time — takes its inspiration from the mixture of high school drama and found footage used in Toronto filmmakers Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller’s debut, The Dirties.
Eng, now 20, describes that film as part of his film’s DNA. Eng, who used his college savings to make Therapy Dogs, reached out to Johnson and Miller serve as executive producers here.
The title refers to an actual visit to the school from a social agency showing off some therapy dogs and their handlers. But metaphorically, it’s about a clique of friends who serve as emotional support humans for each other during that transition between childhood and adulthood.
Segmented into free-form titled chapters, with Jackass-style stunts, video diary entries, interviews, bits of archival footage and recordings of school events, Therapy Dogs focuses mostly on the sometimes-fractious relationship between two friends, played by Eng and co-writer Justin Morrice.
Three chapters devoted to the struggles of another friend, Kevin Tseng, a songwriter, musician and actor, who worries a lot about his future. As he mournfully notes, “You can’t get recognized when no one knows you exist.”
The opening scene is, frankly, unpromising: a virtual copy of the first three minutes of Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird. But Therapy Dogs regains its footing in shots that track through hallways that suggest a minimum security prison atmosphere of a typical high school.
Our narrator, Ethan, is not feeling the school spirt. The first chapter is entitled “Tyler’s Video,” which consists of a grab-bag of decade old high-school scenes, purportedly to acknowledge Ethan’s morbid fascination with a student who committed suicide at the school a dozen years before.
Other chapter segments include “Bad Ideas Are Better with Friends,” “Halfway Through the School Year and We’re Going Nowhere,” and “Parties Suck, I Need Someone,” an off-beat goof, done with secret recording and animation, in which Ethan unsuccessfully invites a stripper to be his prom date.
There’s a blowout teen party, of course, where (shock!) underage students get wasted. They do some graffiti tagging, smash things up. In one of the more memorable sequences, they decide to shoot a scene with a GoPro camera and Justin tied to a roof of a Mazda doing donuts in a parking lot when a cop shows up.
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The policeman encourages them to keep the camera running (he says it will help in court). After he has received sufficient abject apologies, he tells them to “explore your movie career in other ways that are safer.”
Even at 83 minutes, Therapy Dogs can feel repetitive and disconnected (as, in fairness, can being in high school) and the dramatic inventions aren’t always credibly integrated with the found footage. Notably, the focus on lonely guys and their horny violent fun pretty much leaves out girls, including girls as friends.
Curiously, there’s even less attention in the script to the familiar burden of senior year — what post-secondary school are you getting into? It’s almost as if Eng knew he was going straight into his chosen profession. (He’s currently working on his second feature).
Those qualifications aside, Therapy Dogs is a real accomplishment, a dispatch from the adolescent war front that doesn’t stint on the gory details.
Therapy Dogs. Directed by Ethan Eng. Written by Ethan Eng and Justin Morrice. Starring Ethan Eng, Justin Morrice, Kevin Tseng, Kyle Peacock, Mitchell Cidade, Sebastian Neme, Andrew Michalko, Thomas Palewicz and Jayden Frost. Therapy Dogs has its World Premiere in competition, in the Narrative Features section at the 2022 Slamdance Film Festival. To purchase a $10 festival pass, go here.