ZEN DOG: A Psychadelic Trip That Isn’t Worth Taking

Now, what I would call a real swinging human being is a person who lives on two levels at once…

Alan Watts was a British philosopher, author and speaker, famous for bringing Eastern philosophy to a Western audience.  Though he died in 1973, his words and ideas have left a large impact on pop culture. He has inspired songs and been sampled by artists as divergent as Van Morrison, Cheryl, and Logic. He’s been a character in the movie Her (though voiced by Brian Cox). He’s even the subject of a video game.

Despite all this exposure, Alan Watts‘ recordings have never before been heard in a narrative feature film. Zen Dog, the directorial debut of Rick Darge, is the first time his estate has allowed permission for their use. Is Zen Dog the right venue for Watts‘ posthumous movie debut?

Zen Dog

Reed (Kyle Gallner) lives a life of routine. Every day he eats his cereal, brushes his teeth, does star jumps on the roof as he looks over San Francisco, commutes to the office of his floundering internet start-up, commutes back, goes to sleep. Even his dreams are the same.

It’s a comfortable life, but a boring one. So when his cousin Dwayne (Adam Herschman) comes to visit, and introduces him to a special tea that allows you to control your dreams, Reed jumps at the chance to break up his monotonous life. He isn’t prepared though, for how majorly his dreams will influence his reality.

A Promising Set-Up

It starts well. That’s one thing you can grant Zen Dog. Darge deftly sets up the tedium of Reed’s existence. He opens with the repeating nightmare (including an odd cameo from Clea Duvall) that always ends with him witnessing a suicide. He establishes the cereal/star jumps/commute routine. There are some lovely visual compositions along the way; Reed’s world is comprised of squares upon squares upon squares, and monochrome squares at that.

The back-and-forth between Reed and Dwayne is also entertaining. Reed has OCD; Dwayne leaves his dirty underwear on the table. Reed has his business; Dwayne’s employment is unclear. Reed sleeps normally (well, aside from the nightmares); Dwayne sleeps for twenty minutes every two hours thanks to his ‘polyphasic sleep schedule’.  The two men have little in common, but their interactions are fun to watch; Herschman proves himself an adept deliverer of non-sequiturs. When his character starts to fade into the background, you miss him.

Then there’s the lucid dream plot, which initially seems intriguing. Between Reed’s bizarre nightmare and Dwayne’s instructions on how to know whether you’re in a dream or reality, Zen Dog looks to be positioning itself as a kind of indie Inception. There’s even a spinning totem! It all appears like we are heading somewhere fascinating. Soon it becomes clear that we aren’t.

Waste Of A Good Concept

Zen Dog takes all it has going for it- the high concept, the strong visual identity and humour- and flushes it down the proverbial toilet. The story possibilities of lucid dreaming are the most painful waste. With a film set in a dreamscape, you could do pretty much anything (budget-permitting, of course).  It provides a great opportunity to get creative, or just really, really strange. The world, any world, could be your oyster.

And what does Darge do with all this story potential? He sends Reed to try on some funny clothes with a pretty woman named Maya (Celia Diane).  They go and stand on a roof (Darge sure does love rooves) and whoop at the city below. They walk along some railway tracks. Out of all the options available, he uses the most tedious, quotidian, Instagram-friendly. The third act seems more like a music video than a movie.

To be fair to Darge, for a while, he tries. The first lucid dream Reed has sees him arrive at a casino, where he gets involved with a shady man (Devin Finch) and his wife (Sady Diallo). It’s a strange segment that doesn’t fit with the rest of the film; it’s oddly sexual, and out of place in the whole ‘break away from the norm, live your best life’ treatise. Yet it shows some imagination. It shows at least a partial desire to engage with the lucid dreaming idea. It doesn’t last.

Visually too, Zen Dog becomes a disappointment. As you’d expect, as a contrast to Reed’s monochrome real life, his dream life is hyper-saturated. The greens and the blues are bright enough to sear your eyeballs. That actually works quite well.

It’s when the Zen Dog goes full-on psychedelic that things come apart. As if in an attempt to make up for the nothing of a plot, Darge and cinematographer Richie Trimble try to simulate an acid trip; there are double-exposure shots,  funhouse mirrors warps, and vivid washes of colour. These moments last far too long, and again, resemble a music video far more than they do a movie.

Even Alan Watts‘ words, the big selling point, are wasted. His voice is prominent, but ill-used. His teachings are  simply a soundtrack to Reed’s dull journey, or to the psychedelic times he shares with literal dream-girl Maya. It’s hard to imagine why Watts‘ family thought that Zen Dog was the right film to introduce him to a larger audience.

In Conclusion

For a while, Zen Dog shows a lot of promise, with an interesting concept and some funny lines. It soon disintegrates into a series of indie tropes and inane ‘inspirational’ messages. There’s nothing unique or noteworthy about a movie that blithely tells you to follow your dreams while the hero stands on a mountain with outstretched arms.

Anything compelling about Zen Dog has dissipated well before the end credits start to roll.  It’s an inauspicious movie debut for both Rick Darge and the voice of Alan Watts .

Have you seen Zen Dog? What did you think? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!

Zen Dog will be released in the US on June 22, 2018. For all international release dates, see here.