Heart of the Beast: a bracingly executed man-and-dog survival story

Cynics once used to joke about equestrian-themed films that “The horse has all the best lines.” In Heart of the Beast, Odin the German Shepherd may not actually have the best lines, but he has the best reaction shots. Dogs are naturally expressive, but it takes a particular craft to make their expressions signify on screen exactly as required. While this film eschews the too obvious anthropomorphic emotional tweaks, the efforts of director David Ayer, director of photography Mauro Fiore, editor Dody Dorn and the dog wranglers involved combine to make Odin’s glances – and sometimes, seemingly knowing exchanges of looks with Brad Pitt – as charged as they can possibly be.

Those looks matter in a film that is sparing with words. Pitt’s traumatised ex-soldier James is the archetypal tough, taciturn loner, a descendant of the western’s hallowed frontiersmen. But his silence stems from the horrors he has seen – and perpetrated – while serving with the US Special Forces, visible in his flashbacks to action in (presumably) the Gulf, shown in kinetically edited, sepia-tinged sequences. He has consequently become like an animal in his wary solitude: his first instinct on seeing a friendly human approaching is to point his rifle.

The only time that spoken words really count here – beyond James’s terse commands or words of encouragement to Odin – comes when the travellers encounter that other solitary figure. He is Watkins, a voluble former gold miner played by J.K. Simmons, relishing the time-honoured ‘old coot’ routine. It’s actually Pitt who gets the film’s best line here: when Watkins makes a corny observation about his military bearing (“You got that quiet, stern demeanour about you”), James echoes it in a mocking riposte.

Apart from Watkins and a woman (Anna Lambe) who meets Odin on the road, there are no other human presences. This is a spare, businesslike story of wilderness survival, and a man-dog bromance in the lineage of the 1972 adaptation of The Call of the Wild, starring Charlton Heston (at a guess, it’s this or another Jack London novel, White Fang, that Watkins leaves James as a gift).

Here, however, man and dog share not just a bond but an outright equivalence. Both suffer from PTSD, Odin (played by Uber and three of his progeny) also afflicted with sepia nightmares. And both are physically scarred: battle wounds leave James with a weak heart, while Odin has a prosthetic leg and titanium replacement teeth, which will stand him in good stead when fighting off wolves.

Scripted by Cameron Alexander, this is not the type of wilderness narrative that makes nature the crucible in which a hero is reforged in stronger, more resilient form; James is amply resilient from the start. He may, after several near-death experiences and plunges in and out of deep water, undergo symbolic rebirths. But in another way, he is already dead – at least, dead to the restrictive codes of human culture. His current life, on borrowed time, is the proverbial permanent vacation: he is, in every sense, off the grid.

Those themes apart, Heart of the Beast is a more or less generic survival movie, efficiently, at times bracingly executed, with the traditional symbolic streak: the beast of the title being at once man, war and nature. But existential resonances are downplayed in favour of tense action. There are coolly handled moments – a face-off with a shakily CGI’d bear – and some genuinely nerve-racking thrills, notably a sequence with a bridge of trees over rapids. James’s subsequent tumble down river is more kinetically intense than such sequences often are: we vividly sense the rocks that scrape or slam against him, leading to a broken arm that Odin helps him reset (now that really is a good dog).

Ayer worked with Pitt on the World War II drama Fury (2014), one of the director’s more serious-minded ventures. After his recent bull-headed four-to-the-floor Jason Statham vehicles (The Beekeeper, 2024; A Working Man, 2025), Heart of the Beast marks Ayer’s return to more contemplative territory, to something that, as adventure movies go, could loosely count as art cinema. There are touches of aesthetic rapture in scenes that show the heroic duo advancing through dense primeval forest (New Zealand standing in for Alaska). But this essentially being solid box-office product, Jared Michael Fry’s instant-awe music is splashed on where silence would play more effectively. The quieter moments, conversely, allow you to appreciate Odin’s heavy breath, prominent in the sound design and oddly reassuring.

► Heart of the Beast is in UK cinemas now.