There’s a certain kind of horror movie that feels less like a story and more like a grad student’s ethics-board nightmare stretched to feature length. Like Dogs is one of those—and not even the good kind, where the ethics board is horrified because the ideas are bold. No, this is the kind where you imagine some poor committee reading the proposal and going, “So… your entire methodology is ‘torture people in a basement and hope it’s thematic’?”
The premise is actually solid in theory: a psychological experiment in which humans are treated like dogs to explore dominance, conditioning, dehumanization, and identity. In practice, it plays like someone watched Saw, Martyrs, and a YouTube video on classical conditioning, then said, “Okay, but what if we remove tension, nuance, and… writing?”
Human Kennels and Dumb Science
We open with Lisa, kidnapped into the back of a white van like every urban legend’s cold open, then waking up in a concrete kennel. She has:
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A dog bed
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An animal water bottle
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Food in a metal bowl
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A collar and chain
It’s a strong, disturbing visual. And for about ten minutes, you can almost believe the film knows what it’s doing.
Then the “experiment” starts to unfold via clinical notes and the occasional clipboard, and you realize this is less “Stanford Prison Experiment” and more “escape room designed by someone who barely passed Psych 101.”
Lisa gets punished for “misbehavior” with:
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A shock collar
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Drugged food
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Arbitrary punishments that feel more like kink gone wrong than rigorous science
We’re supposed to buy this as a university-funded study. In reality, any halfway competent IRB would have shut this down at “we chain them to the wall like labrador retrievers and feed them ground beef.”
It’s not just ethically dubious—this is horror, we expect that—it’s intellectually lazy. The premise begs for sharp commentary on how institutions dehumanize people. Instead, we get a lot of electrocution and hallucinations, and not nearly enough brain.
Dog Days of Dialogue
Lisa eventually realizes she’s not alone. There’s another subject—Adam—further down the row of concrete kennels. They:
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Talk to each other
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Suffer punishment together
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Slowly get moved closer, like misbehaving strays at a very illegal shelter
On paper, their dynamic could’ve been tense, tragic, even darkly romantic. Instead, the dialogue is stiff and exposition-heavy, like two NPCs trying to emotionally bond inside a badly written indie game.
The script never trusts us to infer anything. Every emotion, every realization, every tiny plot shift is announced out loud, then underlined emotionally, and then repeated via hallucination just in case we missed it the first two times.
Annabel Barrett and Ignacyo Matynia do what they can with the material, but there’s only so much nuance you can wring out of lines that mainly consist of, “What’s happening to us?” and “We have to get out of here,” and “Wait, was it all a hallucination?” The performances start to feel less like characters breaking down and more like actors trapped in a more polite, non-union version of Saw.
When a Twist is Just a Circle
The film leans heavily on hallucinations as a narrative device, which is horror’s cinematic equivalent of a student using extra spacing to hit the page count. Lisa’s escape attempts, emotional confessions, and even some of the character beats are undercut with, “Just kidding, that was in her head.”
Used sparingly, this can be powerful. Used constantly, it does three things:
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Makes it impossible to care about consequences
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Turns the plot into a narrative shrug
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Feels like a cheat whenever the writers write themselves into a corner
There’s a midpoint “twist” where we learn Lisa herself helped design the experiment. That should be a huge “oh, damn” moment. Instead, it’s delivered with all the energy of someone revealing they also contributed to the group PowerPoint. Because by then, we already know:
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The study is nonsense
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The methodology is nonsense
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Everyone involved in designing it is either incompetent or evil
So finding out Lisa is part of the problem doesn’t add complexity. It just makes her look stupid on top of traumatized.
George, Worst Scientist Alive
Then we have George, the kind of character you get when you mix “unethical researcher,” “creep,” and “plot device” into a blender and forget to add personality.
George:
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Helps run the experiment
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Abuses his power
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Injects people with hallucinogens like he’s seasoning a steak
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Has the emotional maturity of a Reddit troll in a lab coat
When he starts shutting off cameras, assaulting subjects, and going rogue, the film clearly wants him to become the Big Human Monster overshadowing the pseudo-scientific cruelty of the experiment itself. The problem is, the baseline was already so messed up that his escalation feels less like a shocking turn and more like, “Ah yes, of course the unethical torture study was run by a guy who should not be near a stapler, let alone human beings.”
By the time we get to his “twist”—that Lisa’s hallucinated scenes with Adam were actually him, drugging and assaulting her—it’s less horrifying revelation and more exhausted checkbox ticking. Of course he’s also a rapist. Of course the film uses that as a late-stage shock embellishment instead of fully dealing with it. The story wants the edge without the weight.
Final Act: Bark, Bite, Burn
Once the film barrels into its last act, it drops any remaining pretense of psychological complexity and just goes full splatter-curriculum:
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Fisher, the higher-up at the university, gets strangled and stuffed in a freezer.
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Erika tries to do the right thing and ends up sedated and tied up.
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George forces Lisa to choose who dies via choke collar, then toys with both victims because apparently the experiment has now evolved into “Just Being A Sadist.”
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Lisa eventually turns the tables and collars George instead, electrocuting and choking him to death.
You’d think this might feel cathartic. And in the most basic, “bad guy gets his throat crushed by his own cruelty” way, it sort of is. But the movie is so in love with its misery that it barely lets that satisfaction land before pivoting to:
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Lisa knocking out Erika
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Deciding she’ll need Erika’s identity next
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Burning the facility
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Walking out wearing Erika’s clothes and glasses like a discount Final Girl impostor
And then—just in case anyone was worried about closure—the credits scene shows a battered Erika crawling out of the burning building. Because nothing can end, nothing can be resolved, and everything has to be just unresolved enough to feel edgy.
Themes That Could Have Been
Buried somewhere under all the shocks, collars, and van kidnappings, Like Dogs has the bones of something genuinely disturbing and thoughtful:
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The dehumanization of experiment subjects
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How institutions hide abuse behind jargon and grants
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Identity as something malleable and disposable, especially for vulnerable people
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The way trauma can turn victims into perpetrators
But instead of really exploring these, the film mostly pokes them with a cattle prod and runs away giggling. Every time it touches on something interesting—Lisa’s shifting identities, Adam’s emotional dependence, Erika’s moral panic—it sprints back to its comfort zone: chains, drugs, and choking.
Final Verdict: More Whimper Than Bite
Like Dogs wants to be a brutal, thought-provoking descent into dehumanization and madness. What it actually is, most of the time, is a clumsy, mean-spirited thriller with flashes of promise buried under repetitive cruelty and shallow twists.
If you’re into:
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Underground-lab aesthetics
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Low-budget sadism
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And the occasional satisfying “villain gets collared” moment
…you might find enough here to justify the watch, especially if you treat it like late-night trash cinema.
But if you’re hoping for a sharp, disturbing exploration of humans being reduced to animals by systems of power, this one is more fetch than philosophy. And honestly, it doesn’t even fetch that well.
