Dog Breath

Alex is caught in a cycle he cannot seem to break. In Virgile Ratelle's French-language short from Quebec, addiction pulls the young man into a circle of men whose rituals of dominance and cruelty pass for friendship, and each step deeper leaves him with less of himself to hold onto. Dog Breath is a stark thirteen-minute portrait of how toxic masculinity operates from the inside: the pressure to prove oneself, the abuse disguised as initiation, the loneliness of a man who has nowhere else to go. Fabien Corbeil plays Alex, with Samuel Vollering as Sam and Jean-François Gagné as Dave among the men who surround him. Ratelle keeps the camera close and unflinching, making the film an unsettling but compassionate study of a person trying to survive the world he has fallen into.