Puppy

REVIEW
To say that Liz (Nadia Townsend) is having a bad day would be a considerable understatement. Hastily evicted by her sister Jackie (who essentially calls Liz a failure in life), Liz then goes out and contemplates suicide, only to be “rescued” by Aiden (Bernard Curry). There’s just one problem: Aiden has just gone off his antipsychotic medication, and he believes that Liz is actually his wife, who has long since abandoned him. He subsequently abducts her and holds her captive in his isolated house to ensure that she doesn’t leave him again –- but, for Liz, she knows that things can only get better from here. Stories of the relationships between kidnappers and their captives are prevalent in films, ranging from the darkly disturbing (The Collector) to the romantic and comic (Buffalo ‘66). One of the unique qualities of the Australian drama Puppy is that it manages to integrate both of those approaches to this archetypical tale: Liz is understandably enraged at her imprisonment, but she is ultimately also drawn to this kindred tormented soul, and her empathy for Aiden grows as she learns more about his troubled past. And when outsiders threaten the strange relationship that has developed between Liz and Aiden, she takes some drastic measures that suddenly leave the viewer wondering whether Aiden is really the unstable one in this couple after all. Writer-director Kieran Galvin elicits superlative performances from Townsend and Curry, and deftly utilizes the widescreen ratio to lend an eerie scope to this intimate twohanded character study.