Review: Los Reyes Is a Sobering Buddy Comedy from a Canine Point of View

In recent years, Hollywood has pumped out a spate of largely interchangeable weepies about man’s best friend, from A Dog’s Purpose to A Dog’s Journey. Shamelessly mawkish and manipulative, these films portray dogs as having no purpose other than to serve their human masters. The human-canine bond is—or at least can be—far more complex and interesting than these films suggest, which is why Iván Osnovikoff and Bettina Perut’s Los Reyes comes as such a refreshing alternative, providing a peek into the freewheeling lives of two mangy street mutts who possess unique personalities and emotional lives.

A blissful documentary portrait of Chola and Football, who take up residence at the Los Reyes skateboard park in Santiago, Chile, Los Reyes doesn’t filter these animals through the lens of human experience, but rather approaches them on their own terms, gently observing them as they laze around, play with balls, and generally enjoy the pleasures of life within the park. The result is a quietly radical attempt to view the world from a non-human perspective that also doubles as a chilled-out buddy comedy of sorts. Shot from the bottom of a vert ramp, with their heads framed against the clear blue sky above, Chola and Football radiate nothing less than the same iconic slacker vibes of a Bill and Ted or Cheech and Chong.

The film captures moments of vitality, beauty, and hilarity, such as a striking sequence in which Football woos a random street dog one night, and though she at first seems to reject him, the scene cuts to the following morning where the two are seen shagging. After witnessing the act, Chola, seemingly jealous, keeps her distance from Football. Then, in a simultaneously mystifying and uproarious moment, she finds a pillow left out in the park and starts humping it, either teasing her pal or trying to figure out what all the fuss is about.

At first, Chola and Football seem to be making it completely on their own, but there are hints that they’re being looked after, as their nails are clipped, their teeth are squared off, and, at one point, after a particularly brutal heat wave, a couple of dog houses are installed in the park. Osnovikoff and Perut avoid doling out too much information about who might be caring for the canines; we don’t even know how they stay fed. But they make room for glimpses of human society. We not only see skaters doing tricks and occasionally playing with the dogs, we also hear their voices throughout the film as they chat to each other about their families, dreams, and addictions. While these passages flesh out the social milieu of the skate park, they feel thematically disconnected from the world of the dogs, glimpses of a distant universe.

Of course, Chola and Football do have their own problems, as becomes clear in the documentary’s final passages, which provide one of the most wrenching and resolutely unsentimental evocations of canine death ever put on screen. Eerily depicted via close-up shots of his body covered in flies, Football’s demise is rendered primarily as a physical process of degeneration. This stands in sharp contrast to archetypal cinematic doggie deaths such as Old Yeller’s or Marley’s, which are solely concerned with the emotional toll that such moments have on dog owners. But for Osnovikoff and Perut, the only reaction that matters is that of Chola, who searches around for her deceased friend and, upon finding him gone, howls into the air. It’s a haunting finish to a film of such invigorating spirit.