Based solely on its premise, director/producer/editor Elizabeth Lo’s new film, Stray, could sound like one of those cute Disney animal documentaries. Filmed in Istanbul, Turkey between 2017 and 2019, she follows a few stray dogs as they wander around the city. Turkey is the only country in the world where it’s illegal to neuter or even capture a stray dog, so Lo’s subjects behave with a relaxed sense of freedom that would be impossible anywhere else. The film would be charming enough if we just watched the dogs wander, but it eventually becomes clear that Lo is using them to make larger points and it’s the way she makes those points that determines whether the film works for a given viewer.
While Lo follows a few different strays throughout, she primarily focuses on a dog we know as Zeydin — though her name differs depending on which group of humans she’s with. As one faceless stranger notes, Zeydin is a “beautiful” dog and there’s a pleasure in simply watching her stroll through the streets as lovers quarrel or other, leashed dogs walk by in the background. Though humans seem largely ornamental in Zeydin’s life, the more time we spend with her, the more Lo allows the viewer to pull meaning from small moments.
Perhaps most striking is the difference between the way locals and tourists treat Zeydin and the other strays. In one scene, we watch her and other dogs tear into a pile of garbage bags waiting for collection. Rather than yell at the dogs for making their jobs harder as we’d expect, the men who pick up the trash actually don’t seem to mind, even making sure one dog doesn’t hoard the spoils from Zeydin. Compare that to a pair of tourists Zeydin encounters in a park. They’re initially a little scared of her and quickly become annoyed when she poops not far from them, threatening all the while that Zeydin better leave before non-existent animal control picks her up. Taken on their own, each encounter is just a discreet moment in Zeydin’s life. Together, they become an expression of the way a simple shift in policy results in a profound difference in how strays are treated.
However, while Lo frequently manages to cull meaning from the seemingly mundane moments of Zeydin’s life, there are many choices that feel heavy-handed or even forced. In one passage, Zeydin and other dogs stare at a large group of women protesters. Lo doesn’t make their motivations entirely clear, but we can glean that it has to do with women’s rights. So, there’s something discomfiting in the way Lo includes a shot where a male dog forces itself on Zeydin and the marching women stop to push it off of her. On one hand, it’s an ironic show of solidarity, an elegant visual metaphor for the agency these women are marching to attain for themselves. On the other, that irony could almost read as belittling their cause, a visual metaphor for how futile their difficult and necessary fight still is in the face of a system that still holds all the power. How that moment reads will depend on the viewer and it’s the film’s similar moments of open interpretation that ultimately dictate whether it succeeds as a whole.
After introducing a group of refugee homeless boys who break into a construction site to sniff glue earlier in the film, Lo follows the group for much of its second half, as they begin to bring both Kartal and Zeydin into their group. Watching both the boys and the dogs wandering through the city, it’s easy to see the similarities in their situations, but things diverge starkly when the boys are picked up by authorities for sleeping on the streets and never return. Where dogs roam the streets without the threat of capture, children with nowhere else to go are arrested for doing the same.
It’s a stark comparison and one that will leave a lot of viewers thinking about the ways people and governments treat vulnerable groups long after the credits roll. However, for likely just as many, even Lo’s delicate approach to making that comparison will feel gauche or possibly even trivializing. For those viewers, spending so much time watching Zeydin wander the streets and interact with humans will feel like a cutesy distraction from the humanitarian crisis Lo seemingly wants to address.
Still, regardless of what meaning viewers ultimately take from Stray, it’s hard to deny that watching the way people react to the dogs followed here reveals something larger about human behavior and compassion. For some, that meaning will be found in the way a simple shift in protocol shifts the way people treat the animals. For others, the film will stand as an ironic and somewhat damning indictment of people’s capacity to dehumanize even the most vulnerable people among us.
