TIFF 2025: Dog 51 Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

We used to make our movies about AI; now it seems as if every day is a threat that we’ll start letting AI make our movies for us. Such a premise might function as a credible dystopian thriller in itself—one that, at least, would prove disturbingly timely in this, the nonstop corporate quest to fully devalue art in all its forms—but unfortunately, this isn’t the AI-centric premise chosen by director Cédric Jimenez. No, his latest Dog 51 is instead a cautionary futuristic tale about the mistrust placed in our sentient artificial programs.

…How refreshing.

If nothing else, the proliferation of AI in today’s media landscape ensures that this concept remains relevant through the foreseeable future, but that doesn’t mean that Jimenez’s rote approach to his futuristic class-based perdition is any bit inspired in its purported relevance. Instead, Dog 51 posits the same old questions with the same old answers, and no amount of quintessentially French attitude towards violent rebellion can fully colour this grey techno hellscape.

The film’s version of Paris is one compartmentalized into three districts, each one denoting a distinct levelling-up in class—visually, this seems represented by (what else?) proximity to the Eiffel Tower; movement between zones is strictly monitored through electronic bracelets worn by all, and subsequently controlled like the closed borders of a staunchly anti-immigrant nation. Zem (Lellouche) is a jaded cop from the poorest Zone 3, who comes to be involved in a city-wide investigation into the assassination of the creator of the police force’s ALMA AI system. Forced into this investigation alongside hard-nosed Zone 2 officer Salia (Exarchopoulos), the pair comes to be embroiled in a conspiracy that knows no borders.

The robustness of the film’s cast extends well beyond the casting of old-timer Lellouche and (at this rate, veteran) star Exarchopoulos; Garrel, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Romain Duris all feature in prominent roles meant to round out the world of Dog 51. At least, these roles are prominent to the degree that Jimenez and Olivier Demangel’s clumsy script assures us they are, as the film, in practice, makes so little use of any of them that the end result comes to be almost insultingly lazy. The sparing use of a big name isn’t a problem so much as their clear underuse within the framework that the film in question has established, and Dog 51 flows between these players with all the confidence and conviction of a science-fiction exercise written in an hour during a creative writing workshop.

Not that there’s anything especially “creative” about Dog 51, either, for Jimenez largely keeps his action thrills amateurishly staged—difficult as it may be to curate a nightclub-set action scene lacking in allure by default—and his Laurent Gaudé-originating narrative even more so. At most, the film teases something in the way of a promising dynamic between Lellouche and Exarchopoulos—the pair already having an established rapport from the former directing the latter just last year in Beating Hearts—but even these small nuggets are tossed to the side in favour of making their time apart a defining emotional feature without first properly defining their time together.

In the end, Dog 51 may be about AI rather than made by it, but in parts, Cédric Jimenez’s sleepwalking sci-fi might very well leave you wondering. It’s the only sense of wonder the film will evoke, at any rate…

still courtesy of VVS Films

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Julian Malandruccolo

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