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Trailer for "Year of the Dog"

Molly Shannon is a funny-looking actress, which I do not mean in an unkind way. With her big teeth and needle nose, you look at her on screen and think, “Aha, here is someone who is going to make me laugh.” I presume that is why Mike White, here moving from screenwriter (Chuck and Buck, The Good Girl) into the director’s chair, cast her in the lead role of this, a movie that wants to keep you guessing whether you’re supposed to be laughing at it, with it or not laughing at all. She plays Peggy, who works as a secretary in a real estate firm and has carefully structured her life as a single woman. She has minimal human relationships with her co-workers, and with her brother and his wife and children, but generally reserves her emotional involvement to her beagle, Pencil. (Not in a nasty way: That would be the Bobcat Goldthwaite-directed Sleeping Dogs Lie you’re thinking of.) When Pencil meets an untimely and unexpected death, Peggy is left with an emotional void that she struggles to fill, in ways that lead her to learn about her true nature. I write this having seen the entire film, but let me tell you, watching it proceed I had no idea where it was going. White directs in a purposely static manner, with his actors geometrically arranged in the camera eye: Neither they nor the camera ever moves, giving us the impression of watching specimens under a microscope. (Much of the film consists of cutaway shots to Peggy listening to the petty obsessions of other people, which gives us the uncomfortable feeling of being the specimens under her microscope.) As Peggy’s life gets progressively messier, the film seems to be heading into the territory of Todd Solandz (Happiness), albeit without the really shocking stuff. And while I will do you the favor of telling you that Peggy eventually pulls herself together, for a while her decline makes for discomfiting viewing (no surprise to anyone who recalls White’s own performance in Chuck and Buck). The net result is a film that develops such an aura of creepiness that its feel-good finale does little to wash away that vibe.