Caleb Landry Jones arrives in Dogman as Douglas — raised in a cage by a religious fundamentalist father who believed dogs deserved more than children — performing Édith Piaf in sequins and full makeup, commanding a trained pack with the authority of a man who learned trust from animals before he learned it from people. The opening scene establishes the terms. The rest of the film honors them.

Directed by Luc Besson, Dogman is built around a police psychologist’s interrogation of Douglas, which becomes the scaffold for a life reconstructed in fragments: the kennel, the church, the street, the stage. Besson’s work since Lucy has been commercially reliable, intermittently sharp, never entirely certain of its ambitions. Here, the ambition is legible. Douglas built a world from scratch with the only creatures that never lied to him — and when the world that discarded him crossed his path again, he turned those creatures outward. The dogs are his soldiers. The cabaret is his release. The crime plot is almost incidental. The film’s real subject is the logic of survival in a person who had to construct every value from zero.

Besson’s direction maintains its structural discipline. The interrogation frame works because it is used to reconstruct, not to summarize — the audience understands Douglas incrementally, as the psychologist does, in the same order and with the same information. The flashback architecture is clean. The dog training sequences are the film’s most immediate evidence of what Besson can still do: they carry weight, choreography, and physical consequence. The action genre rarely earns its kinetics anymore; these sequences earn them.

Jones’s performance is the film’s structural load. Douglas is not a victim performing resilience for the audience’s benefit. He is a man who arrived at a particular logic — morally ambiguous, emotionally coherent — and Jones plays the logic, not the sentiment. The physicality is entirely constructed: the movements, the voice, the relationship to the wheelchair, the instinctive ease with dozens of trained dogs in a confined space. It is the kind of committed work that the Academy nominates once every few cycles and passes over twice as often. This was a pass. The oversight belongs in the record.

Dogman competed for the Golden Lion at the 80th Venice Film Festival. Critics placed it as a significant but secondary Besson work — a reasonable reading if you center the director’s career. If you center the performance, it belongs in the short list of 2023’s essential cinema. The film’s theatrical reach was limited. The wider audience has been slow to find it. It rewards finding.

The craft is above average, the story functional, the performances extraordinary. A film that carries the argument it sets up and delivers on Jones’s opening promise. Besson has not made anything this confident in years. Jones has rarely made anything more complete.