DOGMAN

There’s a certain electricity that runs through Dogman—not just the kind that flickers from a taser in the dark, but the raw, livewire energy of someone forcing their own story into existence. At just twenty-one minutes, this British thriller grips with the urgency of survival, stripping life down to its barest question: how far would you go when the walls close in and the world demands more than you have to give?

What makes Dogman so compelling isn’t simply its high-concept hook—a competition with a six-figure prize for anyone who can outrun “a dog” for ten minutes—it’s the tension between desperation and morality. The film never feels like a hollow game of cat and mouse; it plays instead like a nightmare born of a rigged economy, a society that forces people into impossible corners. The parking-block setting becomes a pressure cooker, where every decision Tyler makes reveals not just his will to survive, but the kind of man he is becoming under relentless strain.

There’s a raw energy to the film that mirrors its story. You can feel the independence of its making—written, produced, directed, and led by Ezra Elliot—not as a limitation but as a strength.

The scrappiness, the sweat, the sense that everything is on the line: it bleeds from the screen. The Dogman himself, hammer in hand and mask obscuring humanity, is a chilling embodiment of the film’s central fear—that survival is never clean, never fair, and never guaranteed.

Yet Dogman isn’t just bleak. It thrums with defiance. It dares to turn limited means into a cinematic advantage, the way urban legends become scarier when told in the glow of a single lightbulb. By the end, you’re left not with the image of a man being chased, but of a filmmaker running headlong into his own future, refusing to wait for permission.

Short films rarely punch this hard. "Dogman" doesn’t just ask if Tyler can outrun the nightmare—it asks whether any of us can outrun the choices that brought us there in the first place. And that’s what makes it unforgettable.