Movie Review: Lawn Dogs (1997, dir. John Duigan)
What an interesting fucking film.
This review also on Letterboxd.
So like… This is a film from the perspective of a ten-year-old girl who grows up emotionally neglected and isolated in a picture-perfect gated community — having survived a heart transplant, she is in many ways morbid and isolated from other children her age, and this is really driven home by the complete dearth of same-age children in her community but for a little boy who serves as a counterbalance for her presence on screen.
Where Devon (Mischa Barton) is quiet and contemplative, intrigued and engaged by different forms of violence and horror, this little boy shoots toy guns into people’s faces, he destroys glass and steals from things — her violence is intensely targeted and continuous but goes relatively unnoticed because she is so quiet, and most of all because she is a little girl, whereas he is a little boy.
Nonetheless, neither of them fit in this perfect community, made for perfect adults with perfect silhouettes and perfect lives — he doesn’t belong in it anymore than she does, and when he steals all the lamps from the community streets to smash them on the beach as part of his army play, he is so far from anybody’s minds as a suspect they don’t even mention his existence.
