A Vietnamese horror film premiering internationally at the Haapsalu Horror and Fantasy Film Festival in Estonia, Crimson Snout is a perplexing quasi-pro-vegan horror film about a crazed demon dog in a rural part of the country. The sheer amount of skinned frogs and dog meat would lead the viewer, on one level, to assume something of a carnivorous agenda — especially if the viewer assumes the meat is real meat and not computer generated replacements, which would seem beyond the budget of the small genre film. A closer viewing challenges this guttural assumption: in theme, Crimson Snout morally (even if marginally) aligns against the meat industry, specifically the dog meat industry in Vietnam, in ways that rub against the production (assuming the dead animals were indeed real, dead animals).

As a horror film, director Luu Thanh Luan’s feature directorial debut is the kind of horror that stumbles around a village of bad people doing bad things to other bad people. Two not so bad people — Nam (Ngô Quang Tuấn) and his pregnant fiancée Xuân (Mie) — find themselves in the middle of the hostile dog-pile. It’s not that they are good people (or people who tend to do good); they are morally neutral, removed from the decisions that carry moral weight. They do choose, as city folks moving to the small town where Nam was raised, to not eat dog meat. Their dietary decision poses an issue for the family since they raise dogs and own a butchery that sells their meat. 

Mr. Manh, Nam’s dad, died as people tend to die in the horror genre: under mysterious and bloody circumstances. This particular death involves a ghoulish white dog with a red nose. Without any human sense of irony, the dog with a crimson snout guards the dogs being raised for meat by Mr. Manh’s family butchery. Some people around the town start seeing strange things, others find themselves bitten by strange things. Mania lurks and family secrets shove their way out of the shadows and demand resolution. 

I’d be surprised if any audience finds Crimson Snout seriously scary. The CGI dog provokes laughs more than anxiety. The filmmakers aren’t to be blamed here, and certainly not the visual effects artists, but only the limited budget. Director Luu Thanh Luan does manage one effective and genuinely creepy, red-overlayed image about halfway through the film but one image isn’t enough to make a good film. I suppose I also found the skinned, still-breathing frogs upsetting (in a good way). 

The cooked canine plot may deter or perturb some Western animal lovers, for whom dogs have become an extension of the family home. Of course, from a moral standpoint, there is no argument worth its salt that allows for the human consumption of animal meat but somehow gives preferential treatment to our favorite furry friends. Either it’s okay to eat animals or it’s not: those are the two options that the ethicist Peter Singer made evident many decades ago. Whether or not one follows through on the moral demands of Singer’s claims of our speciesism is another question, and one that doesn’t matter for the viewing experience of Crimson Snout. (For what it’s worth, I eat meat.) I still wonder who this movie is for. To make a film that thematically argues against the production and consumption of any kind of animal meat while still (presumably) killing animals or purchasing animals killed for their meat in order to make the film is just an incompatible stance that will satisfy very few. That is, no one other than those proud speciesists who hold canines to a more privileged position than other commonly consumed animals.

Crimson Snout
2023
dir. Luu Thanh Luan
99 min.

Part of the Haapsalu Horror and Fantasy Film Festival