The Plot:
After running over her dead brother's dog, lonely slacker Elizabeth steals some of her sister's jewelry and heads off to the vet. Unfortunately, the dog can't be saved, and once the theft is discovered, she's sent packing. Of course, there's always time to try one last seduction on her sibling's husband - just for old time's sake. Homeless and hurting, Elizabeth attempts suicide. A tow truck driver named Aiden subsequently saves her, and before she knows it, she's a prisoner in his country home. Turns out our Good Samaritan has been off his meds for quite a while, and he has mistaken Elizabeth for his estranged, emasculating wife Helen. Thus begins a clandestine game of captive and mouse – Aiden pawing and psychologically attacking Elizabeth, the unwitting hostage attempting to find a means of escape. Eventually, she convinces her jailer that she's pregnant, and thus begins a kind of truce. But old habits die hard, and soon the couple is at cross-purposes, each trying to twist the other toward their own designs. When bodies – animal and otherwise – start piling up, it's clear there is more to this combination than meets the eye. Either both individuals are incredibly insane, or their craziness covers up for issues of true corruption. Whatever the situation, no one is safe around Elizabeth and her new psychotic Puppy.

The DVD:
There are two major problems with Puppy, issues so obvious they practically stare at you from the screen and shriek their significance in disheartening decibels over and over again. Actually, if you do not combine the main characters into one important quandary, there are THREE enormous errors in writer/director Kiernan Galvin's way of cinematic thinking. You may be able to overcome these fatalistic flaws, and find a connection with these unlikable individuals and the messy moral message their sending out. As a result you'll probably find Puppy a wholly unique experience. Heck, you may even appreciate it on an entirely different, deeper level. But if you prefer actors who use nuance, not emotional nunchucks, to make their strident points, if it bothers you to accept murder, torture and painful manipulation as a motivational means of upward mobility, then you'll find this independent Australian film to be a real chore. Somewhere buried in the middle of all his illustrations of mental illness and attempted human interaction, Galvin has a decent core of an idea. Handled properly, lost souls looking for a connection inside their own insular and fragmented world is probable film fodder. But likeability, or even better, identifiably is a crucial component to making such a strategy work. Sadly, Galvin has no such motion picture purpose.

Indeed, our two leads constantly turn Puppy into an ardent adventure in interpersonal tolerance. As Elizabeth, Nadia Townsend is repugnant. A morass of selfish needs, arrogant entitlement, and suicidal sluttiness, she is supposed to be our guide into this world of dead relatives, passive adultery and reactive homelessness. In essence, Galvin wants us to hate her, knowing that once she enters Aiden's frightful lunatic fringe, we will overlook her massive internal flaws and sympathize with her plight. Sadly, the filmmaker couldn't be more wrong. Elizabeth remains a totally unpleasant creep throughout, simultaneously trying to escape her pseudo-hostage plight and milk this unusual living arrangement for all its worth. Indeed, you can see the gears turning over in her whorish head as she tries to decipher her capture's crackpot logic. Similarly, there is nothing more annoying – at least, within a motion picture setting – than a psychotic who's forgotten to follow his doctor's direct orders. In this case, Bernard Curry is given a string of slightly sinister, unusually unhinged behaviors to follow, and then Galvin turns up the freak quotient by several schizophrenic levels. We are supposed to excuse Aiden's protective abuse, sympathize with his lack of logistics within the real world, and wonder how he even found a wife and got married in the first place. He's more cruel than cure, and his constant conspiracy theorizing really grates after a while.

Still, if it was all in service of a story that didn't play like a Downunder version of Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down minus Pedro Almodovar's wicked wit, if we didn't have an ethically unsound message that constantly thwarts convention to reward criminal behavior, then maybe Puppy would be palatable. But instead, Galvin goes the full malfeasant mile, making Elizabeth into an irresponsible dolt, driven to outbursts of juvenile behavior and desperate to sponge off anyone she can. Throughout her narrative arc, she tricks, taunts, kills and finally covers up capital offenses, all in a pursuit of a permanent place to live. Indeed, all her horrendous behavior is basically calculated to settle her revolving door residential arrangements. Similarly, Aiden gets the medication excuse, the "I'm sorry I attacked you, tried to rape you, held you against your will, psychologically assaulted you and ended up murdering a man, but you see, I'm off my drugs" validation for his every move. It's not that he's merely messed up – he's a volatile, dangerous individual, a man whose sense of right and wrong is completely missing. The last act transformation for both of these unlikable losers – and hers is basically cosmetic – may instill some people to drop everything that's come before and forgive the pair, but the corpses lying in their wake, and the way they happily go on with life, makes a point that is just plain nauseating. Puppy may want to be Bad Boy Bubby without the rock and roll redemption, but Kiernan Galvin can only manage a major psychological morass.

The Video:
Offered by Red Envelope Entertainment, a service of Netflix, this no-frills DVD features a 16x9 anamorphic image that is, oddly, still letterboxed. The image fails to fill the screen, meaning that even individuals with high end home theater set ups will experience the same black bars as those viewers watching from a standard TV configuration. Basically, you have a 2.35:1 transfer using 1.87:1 parameters. The colors are decent, however, and the details are relatively sharp and distinguishable. It's not a reference quality picture by any stretch of the imagination, but it is presentable and professional.

The Audio:
Plagued more by production than reproduction issues, the Dolby Digital Stereo mix here is frustrating. There are times when we cannot hear the dialogue (some are on purpose, but most are not) and instances where the horrible Lilith Fair lite music playing in the background dominates everything. Still, there are no major sonic slights, and the lack of clarity could be a firm aesthetic choice by the director.

The Extras:
None provided, so none discussed – and frankly, none needed. There is no excuse, featurette or commentary-wise, for this kind of confused jumble.

Final Thoughts:
It's all a matter of connection with Puppy. Either you'll sympathize with Elizabeth and Aiden and want to see them overcome their inner difficulties to become a couple, or you will wonder why they simply didn't turn on each other and make with the murdering. In either case, there is just not enough here to outright recommend, and far too much of merit to warrant an absolute rejection. Indeed, there are several times in the movie where Puppy seems to be going places wholly original and unique, only to squander its garnered good will. As a result, a Rent It is perhaps the only appropriate score. It allows individual viewers the opportunity to judge for themselves, and since Red Envelope is a lend/lease service to begin with, such a rating serves definitive double duty. Somewhere in his Aussie cutting room, Kiernan Galvin is working on his next project, believing in his abilities as a filmmaker, and cursing all critics who fail to see the poetry in his problematic personalities. There is no doubting the director's way with a camera. But judging from Puppy, he needs a find a less disagreeable source of motion picture characters. Elizabeth and Aiden don't deserve our empathy – they deserve the death penalty.

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