Luc Besson’s Dogman follows a man who grew up locked in a kennel, learned Shakespeare in a juvenile home and ended up with a cabaret act and a pack of trained dogs. It premiered in competition at Venice in 2023, divided the press, and began the partnership between Besson and Caleb Landry Jones that produced Dracula two years later.

Dogman, written and directed by Luc Besson, opens with an arrest. In New Jersey, police stop a truck full of dogs. At the wheel is Douglas Munrow (Caleb Landry Jones), a man who uses a wheelchair and is dressed in drag. He is taken into custody, and a psychiatrist, Evelyn (Jojo T. Gibbs), is called in to talk to him. The rest of the film is largely his answer to her questions: the story of his life, told in flashbacks.

That story begins in a violent household. Douglas’s father, Mike (Clemens Schick), and his older brother, Richie (Alexander Settineri), are abusive religious fanatics who raise dogs for illegal fights and starve them to make them more aggressive. Douglas feeds the animals in secret. When he admits that he loves the dogs more than his own family, his father locks him in the outdoor kennel with them, and that is where he grows up. A later confrontation with his father over a litter of puppies ends with a gunshot that leaves him paralysed.

The flashbacks then follow Douglas through care homes and a juvenile institution, where a theatre teacher, Salma (Grace Palma), introduces him to William Shakespeare and to the idea that a person can be anyone on a stage. As an adult he lives on the margins: he runs a dog shelter until it is closed, moves his animals into an abandoned school, performs once a week in a drag cabaret, and trains his dogs to steal jewellery from wealthy homes and to protect people in his neighbourhood. An insurance investigator, Ackerman (Christopher Denham), and a local gang boss known as El Verdugo (John Charles Aguilar) eventually close in. How it ends, and what Evelyn makes of it all, is left for the viewer.

Where the idea came from

Besson has said that the starting point was a real news story about a five-year-old boy whose family had kept him locked in a cage. Around it he built a character he could follow from childhood into middle age, and a frame, the conversation with a psychiatrist, that let him jump between periods of Douglas’s life. The film announces its theme before the first scene with a line from the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine: wherever there is an unhappy person, God sends a dog. That quotation also opened the first trailer, shown at a private event at the Grand Rex in Paris in January 2023.

When the project was announced in January 2022, it was Besson’s first film as director since Anna in 2019. French press coverage compared the material to his early films rather than to the large-scale science fiction of Lucy and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: like the heroes of Subway and Léon, Douglas is an outsider living by his own rules on the edge of a city. Dogman is an English-language film, set in New Jersey, but it is a French production, made by Luc Besson Production with EuropaCorp and TF1 Films Production and produced by Virginie Besson-Silla.

Shot in Essonne and Newark

Filming took place in 2022, partly on location in Newark, New Jersey, in June, and partly in France. The French shoot used the château of Saint-Germain-lès-Corbeil and the Dark Matters studios in Tigery, in the Essonne department south of Paris, a facility built for virtual production, in which digital backgrounds are projected on large LED screens behind the actors. Besson shot the film in anamorphic widescreen, with Colin Wandersman as director of photography, Julien Rey as editor and Hugues Tissandier as production designer. The budget has been reported at about 20 million euros, or 21 million dollars.

The music is by Éric Serra, the composer of The Big Blue, Nikita, Léon and The Fifth Element, in what French sources count as his 16th collaboration with Besson. The soundtrack album, released by Because Music, runs to 30 tracks and also includes two Édith Piaf recordings and Autumn Star, a song by Sateen, Besson’s daughter, with Adrien Arnaud. Douglas’s cabaret numbers are performed to recordings: Piaf’s La Foule and Non, je ne regrette rien, and Lili Marleen as Marlene Dietrich.

Caleb Landry Jones and almost a year of preparation

Caleb Landry Jones, born in Garland, Texas, in 1989, had made his debut as a teenager in a small role in No Country for Old Men, and built a reputation in supporting parts in X-Men: First Class, Get Out, The Florida Project and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. In 2021 he won the best actor prize at Cannes for Nitram, Justin Kurzel’s film about the Port Arthur gunman. He is also a musician, with several albums released on the label Sacred Bones since 2020.

Besson has said that the two of them bonded over dogs. Jones described almost a year of preparation, much of it spent in long conversations with Besson about the character and the script. He took ballet and singing lessons, met a trainer’s wolves, walked with a circus elephant, and spent time with a doctor who explained how the bullet that paralyses Douglas would affect his body. He has also said that he did not have to sing the Piaf songs himself, which he described as a relief.

The dogs were the other large logistical task. By Jones’s own count, about 35 dogs worked with him in many scenes, and more than 100 in one action sequence, each group with trainers giving commands off camera. He has joked that the sound department had a rough time, and he has described Besson as a director who operated the camera on his own shoulder for the whole shoot.

The rest of the cast

Jojo T. Gibbs, the American actor known for the series Twenties, plays Evelyn, whose own past becomes part of the conversation. The German actor Clemens Schick, who appeared in Casino Royale, plays the father. Christopher Denham plays Ackerman, Grace Palma plays Salma, Lincoln Powell plays Douglas as a teenager, Iris Bry plays his mother, and Marisa Berenson, the star of Barry Lyndon and Cabaret, appears as an aristocrat. Several drag artists appear in the cabaret scenes.

Venice, a divided press and a slow release

Dogman was first set to open in France on April 19, 2023. After a positive response from buyers at the European Film Market in Berlin that February, the release was pushed back to aim for an autumn festival. It was selected for the main competition of the 80th Venice Film Festival and had its world premiere there on August 31, 2023. It competed for the Golden Lion, was also nominated for the Queer Lion, and won one of the festival’s independent awards, the Fanheart3 Graffetta d’Oro for best film.

The premiere came a few months after a long legal case had ended. In 2018 the actor Sand Van Roy accused Besson of rape, an accusation he denied. Prosecutors dropped the case in 2019, a judge dismissed it in December 2021 after a second investigation, and in June 2023 France’s Court of Cassation confirmed the dismissal. Besson came to Venice for the first time with Dogman, and the festival’s decision to select him drew criticism as well as support.

The press was split. Aggregator scores settled around the middle, while audience ratings on the same sites were markedly higher, and in Germany the FSK classification board described a film that mixes comedy, action and psychological drama in a style that is at times exaggerated. Dogman opened in France on September 27, 2023, sold 289,480 tickets there, and reached Germany and Italy in October. Briarcliff Entertainment released it in the United States in March 2024. Its worldwide gross was about 4.2 million dollars.

From Dogman to Dracula

The most lasting result of Dogman may be the partnership it started. Besson said in 2024 that since working with Jones he had wanted only to make another film with him, calling him crazily talented and comparing what he saw to nothing since Gary Oldman. He then built his next project around the actor: Dracula, released in some countries as Dracula: A Love Tale, with Jones as the count and Christoph Waltz and Zoë Bleu in the cast, again shot by Colin Wandersman and produced by Virginie Besson-Silla, with music by Danny Elfman.

Dracula opened in France on July 30, 2025, and was the highest-grossing French film of that year worldwide, at about 42.5 million dollars on a reported budget of 45 million euros. In the United States it went into wide release in February 2026 and made more than 9 million dollars in its first 10 days, the best run for a French film there since 2017. Like Dogman, it divided critics and scored higher with audiences. Besson has since written and produced Father Joe, with Al Pacino, which premiered at Venice in September 2026.

Seen from 2026, Dogman reads as a turning point in Besson’s late career: a smaller, stranger film than his blockbusters, built on one actor and several dozen dogs, made in a studio designed for virtual production and released after years of legal and financial trouble around its director and his company. Whether its mix of crime story, melodrama and cabaret holds together is a question viewers answer very differently, as the gap between critics and audiences shows. What is not in doubt is that the collaboration between Luc Besson and Caleb Landry Jones did not end with it: it led directly to Dracula.