Name: Heart of the Beast
Director: David Ayer

The reviews landing for Heart of the Beast agree on a shape: Brad Pitt as a wounded veteran, a traumatized combat dog, a wilderness that wants them both dead, and a director finally working below his ceiling toward something like grace. It is, the emerging consensus holds, the most disciplined thing David Ayer has made in a long while — early notices are already calling it his best since Fury. What almost none of the raves quite names is that the discipline and the militarism are the same gesture.

Ayer has always been a director of loyalty codes among armed men — the tank crew of Fury, the patrol car of End of Watch, the brotherhood that curdles in Sabotage. Strip the platoon down to one soldier and one dog, drop them where no one can hear a line of dialogue, and you have not left that cinema behind; you have distilled it. Critics keep reaching for the word “soul.” What they are responding to is Ayer’s oldest subject, the bond forged under fire, rendered wordless and therefore much harder to argue with.

The person carrying it is Pitt, and the auteurist point is that his performance is the machine. Awards Radar notes he “almost feels like he’s slumming it,” then concedes he plays the soldier as vulnerable rather than invincible — a man, not an action figure. That restraint is the film’s real special effect. A veteran who barely speaks cannot deliver a lecture about the flag; he can only endure, and endurance reads as truth. Pitt, who also produced, has built a vehicle in which the star’s silence does the persuading a script would otherwise have to.

Because the script, when it does speak, speaks plainly. Comic Book Club — which still recommends the film — calls it “engaging military propaganda,” and the specifics are hard to wave off: flashbacks the outlet likens to “a recruitment ad,” a closing monologue about seeing “the best and worst of people” in the Army, and a final on-screen note about the importance of military dogs. Matt Neglia of Next Best Picture, in the roundup ScreenRant assembled, put it more bluntly still — “a ton of American propaganda,” “a bit eye-rolling” — before admitting the film moved him anyway. That “anyway” is the whole review. The messaging is not hidden; it is simply outvoted by the dog.

And the dog is, by every account, extraordinary — several animals sharing the role of Odin, filmed by Ayer for their eyes until, several critics confess, the audience is in tears. This is where the survival genre does its familiar work: it is a machine for producing feeling out of proximity and threat, and it does not much care what that feeling is finally attached to. Awards Radar is honest about the price — “there are no real surprises to be found here” — and 25YearsLater warns of nothing especially original. What critics are praising is a beautifully made version of an entirely familiar object.

None of which makes it a bad film. It makes it one worth watching with the sound of its own conviction turned up. A survival two-hander is the most apolitical-seeming shape a movie can take — just a body against the cold — which is exactly why it is such an efficient delivery system for a politics. Ayer knows this. Pitt, near-silent beside his dog, is the reason most viewers won’t notice until the lights come up.

Paramount opens it in the United States this week off a festival bow in San Sebastián, and the awards chatter will fix on Odin — the rare campaign where the frontrunner is a German shepherd. The more interesting fact is the one the applause will bury: Ayer has made his most persuasive film in a decade by giving his soldier almost nothing to say, and letting the star, and the animal, say it for him.

Tags: Brad Pitt, David Ayer, Heart of the Beast, military dogs, survival thrillers