Appalachian Dog

A former tailor comes home from war ready to start his life over again with a young wife he never had the chance to get to know and a business he is no longer able to run.

Teddy (Henning) has just arrived home from war, although which war that was is anyone’s guess. The way the scene is set, with wooden house, old timey conversation, drinking out of glass jars, and no hint of modern conveniences like radio, TV, indoor plumbing, or cars, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it might have been the American Civil War, but the electric lighting tells us that it’s probably something more recent. It doesn’t really matter anyway, because the way Teddy turns up it’s like he’s just dropped in somewhere from the early 2000’s, with his Kmart plaid shirt, chinos and plastic rimmed spectacles, which are apparently army issue.

Unbeknownst to Teddy, he’s come back into the middle of some sort of tryst, where his wife, Marion (Morgan), her best friend Cate (Elizabeth), and the hired help, Peggy (Franklin), are all standing around being cagey with one another whilst trying to keep the conversation on the mundane. Teddy doesn’t help the awkwardness any with his own stilted interjections, and the affectatious Southern drawl that everybody has adopted means everything that is said comes across as mildly tongue-in-cheek. Nobody is saying very much of anything and eventually the stragglers peel away home leaving the old couple to become newly acquainted.

However, out in the wild of the Appalachians, there’s something unfathomable going on. While watching the main characters all interact and slip between one another, there’s an awful lot of passing glances, missed cues and lingering looks which don’t come to very much and which in the long run don’t mean a whole lot either. There’s an unquantifiable cloud hanging over everyone where they don’t seem to know how to be around each other, or just how to be regular people at all. This feeling lasts for the whole one-hundred minutes of the film and is something that is never really addressed or given justification for. It’s as though four aliens are getting dressed up as humans and pretending to give their best approximation of how they think Earth relationships are supposed to go.

This feeling extends dramatically to writer, director and star, Colin Henning’s performance as Teddy, which is a fairly peculiar attempt at characterisation. His mannerisms, speech patterns, and worst of all, costume design are so anachronistic and ill-placed that it makes a mockery of any sort of drama that might have been aimed for in the first place. Couple this with a drastically drab and mundane script that does nothing and goes nowhere, as well as a sound design that is so far removed from the filmed scenes that it disconnects the viewer from nearly everything on screen, and what’s ended up with in Appalachian Dog is something of mess, but a boring mess to boot.

There are a few attempts at ‘love scenes’ throughout Appalachian Dog, as that is ostensibly what the film is supposed to be about, but even these are so stilted and awkwardly handled that they offer no tease or titillation to the viewer at all. The messy entanglement of the characters is played at a plodding pace, and the physical affection so slight, that again it looks like an alien’s approximation of what romance really is.

Thankfully, the cinematography from Aidan Macaluso is solid throughout, and the acting from all the female leads is on point, even if what they are talking about doesn’t really travel. There are some nice establishing shots of the surrounding countryside and the sunsets to go with it, but these are few and far between and don’t really integrate totally with the interior locations.

Appalachian Dog is an odd beast, with a lot of things which just don’t add up properly. Most things feel out of place, or out of time, and the plot never really gets going. At a hundred minutes it’s a bit of a slog to get through such a slow-moving narrative, and in the end nothing is achieved for the viewer to care for or hold onto to make it worth our time.