The Heirloom: When Adopting a Dog Leads to Messes of Many Kinds

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B+

It’s doubtful either Grace Glowicki or Ben Petrie would be crushed to hear they are ever-so-slightly upstaged by an enormously expressive whippet named Cheers in their terrific and tenderly sentimental two-hander, The Heirloom.

Doe-eyed Cheers plays Milly, and in her role, she persuasively conveys all the skittishness (and eventual joy) one would expect from a dog in an unfamiliar and possibly precarious situation. Milly is also the catalyst to the couple’s relationship reckoning, which propels the central narrative. It all starts with the adoption.

Cheerful Allie (Glowicki) wants a dog, especially as the world inches towards pandemic lockdown. Her live-in beau, the quasi-workaholic screenwriter, aspiring filmmaker, and control-freak Eric (Petrie) is ambivalent but willing to go along to make Allie happy.

Allie finds a breeder who describes herself as a “preservationist” protecting breeds from extinction. The breeder can provide a Chinese crested puppy to the couple in exchange for a quick deposit. Eric views breeders as malicious hucksters — he compares their dubious benevolence claims to free-range eggs, brilliant — and advocates for a rescue dog. Cracks in the pair’s relationship surface.

They eventually settle on Milly, a terrified rescue incoming from the Caribbean, whom they collect one night in a soulless parking lot exchange. In preparation, Eric has studied dog behaviour and insists on maintaining a detached cool from the animal to impose pack-like hierarchy. Allie’s impulse is to mother Milly, who initially hides in the closet and refuses to poop. The cracks deepen.

Much of the action in The Heirloom takes place in Allie and Eric’s house, which gives the film an uncommon intimacy. Their interactions with each other and with Milly feel familiar, scanning entirely convincingly as they casually bicker or trade notes on Milly’s progress. The film’s Toronto setting — specifically, the Riverdale area — also brings it home for local viewers, but the reality the couple faces as their desires for the future diverge are universal.

When Eric finally announces he is abandoning the script he has been slaving over to refocus on telling Milly’s story, showing that he is missing the bigger picture, the cracks become a chasm. As the film’s press notes wisely posit, “The Heirloom draws from actors Ben Petrie and Grace Glowicki’s real-life relationship to produce a hilarious chamber piece about a couple teetering between calamity and commitment.” You can say that again.

Petrie also wrote and directed The Heirloom, and the film was apparently not without backstage struggles. The press notes also reveal that the couple “moved all the furnishings from their real-life Toronto home into a rented apartment down the street, creating a simulated recreation of their home. Then, they invited a small crew to spend four weeks filming an improvised re-enactment of their most intimate and tortured experiences adopting their traumatized rescue dog during COVID lockdowns.”

Yowza. Not surprisingly, those conditions apparently had some blowback on Petrie and Glowicki’s off-screen relationship which, also not surprisingly, amplified the drama unfolding on-screen. In the end, what the couple and their crew achieved is a palpable, amusing, and entertaining study in human-to-human — and human-to-canine — interactions at a fraught moment in time.

You don’t see that every day, and certainly not as convincingly as it’s portrayed here in a film winningly and inventively soundtracked by musician Casey MQ.

The Heirloom. Directed by Ben Petrie. Starring Ben Petrie, Grace Glowicki, and Cheers. In select theatres November 29