KVIFF review: Dog and Wolf (2025)

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Future Frames: Generation Next of European Cinema

Male striptease is not every woman’s thing, but there are more than enough customers to keep the show going. The 25-year-old Prague-based Rudo (Tomáš Čapek) lives from this trade and loves to call himself a professional, and when asked by a drunken tourist what his job were, he tells it as it is – a cowboy. Rudo is what the customers that week expect him to be, and sometimes, being told what you are can save you from having to come up with a lie in case you need to do some explaining.

We enter Rudo’s world through the door to a techno club where he dances the night away. He will be dancing to completely different tunes later on, not to his own amusement, but it doesn’t seem to bother him either that he performs to a dying woman in front of her husband, or that when he gets off with a middle aged customer, she wants to pay him like a prostitute. Čapek might, or might not be a natural call-boy talent, but it is thanks to the choreographer Natálie Vacková and the professional dancer Petr Dlugos who plays the lead’s colleague stripper in the movie, that his dancing performances look effortlesly elegant and sexy. Very elegant is also the work by the cinematographer Dušan Husar – the stability of shots, the precision of angles, and its golden brown palette of hues.

Terezia Halamova is good at shaping female side characters, but she doesn’t really know what to do with Rudo who qin his quiet despair doesn’t let the audience to get to know him. He is all mysterious smiles and shruggs. What we know is that our lead man suffers from insomnia and he doesn’t know what to do night after night except to party. Since he is stuck in the past, we got to see a lot of flashbacks that invade his mind. From what the viewer can tell, this comes from a heartbreak caused by the breakup with his girlfriend (Katerina Hulinska). We see her in Rudo’s multiple mental visits to the past that he is confronted with daily. She’s the one telling us why the film is called what it’s called: the hour between dog and wolf is at the end of the night, when it’s not quite bright yet, but it’s not dark anymore. “Most people die at 4 am, and most babies are born at the same time”, she clarifies. It is around that hour that the male stripper is clueless about what to do with himself: it’s the post-night club hour, and too early to start into the day.

Dog and Wolf , a soul-search drama and a study for the feature in development of the same topic since 2022, is the second short by the Slovak director Terezia Halamová, who is about to graduate from the prestigious film academy FAMU in Prague. Although set in the same milieu, Halamova insists that the short and the feature are two completely different movies, the first being a love story and the latter – a road movie. It is going to be interesting to compare the two works one day, and see if the character study takes another, meatier shape, giving more substance to the mourning, but on so many levels vapid leading man.

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Country: Czech Republic
Language: Czech, English, German
Runtime: 20′
Year: 2025
Written and directed by: Terezia Halamova
Produced by: Other Stories, FAMU
Producer: Natalia Pavlove
Director of Photography: Dušan Husar
Additional Cinematography: Kristina Kulova
Editor: Lukaš Janičik
Sound Designer: Anna Jesenska
Production Design: Stella Šonkova
Costume Designer: Zuzana Formankova
Casting Director: Agata Kolarova
Music Composer: Kryštof Blabla
Line Producer: Andrzej Czucz
Choreographer: Natalie Vackova
Cast: Tomáš Čapek, Katerina Hulinska, Emil Rothermel, Manuel Inacker, Petr Dlugos,
Marie Švestkova, Ctirad Götz, Dagmar Edwards, Alena Hladka