Although ostensible progressive strides have been made in the entertainment world over the past few years, trans storytelling and representation remains frustratingly rare in the Hollywood landscape. Filmmaker Vuk Lungulov-Klotz attempts to continue to break through those barriers with his directorial feature debut Mutt, an indie drama that depicts a chaotic day in the life of Feña (Lio Mehiel), a New York City-based trans man afflicted with a series of stressful situations involving people from his past.
Feña runs into and reconnects with his bitter straight ex-boyfriend John (Cole Doman), he’s briefly forced to look after his angsty 14-year-old half-sister Zoe (Mimi Ryder), and he’s supposed to pick up his transphobic Chilean father Pablo (Alejandro Goic) from the airport. All while juggling these demanding circumstances, Feña navigates the hostile landscape of Manhattan and comes up against exhausting challenges just for existing as a trans person.
Along with being one of the very few trans-led productions to come out in recent memory, it’s genuinely exciting to see a story that portrays a trans and queer experience from a trans and queer perspective, regardless of the work’s quality. But despite some gorgeous visuals and lived-in location detail, Mutt’s narrative novelty unfortunately wears thin quickly with an aimless, inelegant approach toward its contained plot. The film’s awkward acting tries to be naturalistic but comes off stilted, its on-the-nose writing undermines every emotional beat with its lack of subtlety, and it struggles to weave together its trio of incidents into a dramatically interesting whole.
The execution of the conflicts Feña encounters is especially heavy-handed, contextualizing each of Feña’s relationships through ham-fisted dialogue and consistently underlining the themes but never truly digging into the surface of its ideas. Mutt’s 24-hour time frame is likely the reason for its limited emotional scope, but Lungulov-Klotz seems to wrestle with engineering momentum in trying to fill in the gaps between Feña’s experiences. The result ends up being a classic case of too much and not enough.
The most prominent (and arguably the most impactful) of Feña’s three encounters is with John, a character struggling to reconcile the person Feña was when they dated and his own discomfort around how Feña’s transness affects his sexuality. Their romantic push and pull generates some clear if muted tension, with the two sharing a sensual, tender kiss in a laundromat in one moment and a cold post-sex detachment in the next. Doman — who has quietly been breaking out with roles in 2015’s Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party, last year’s Starfuckers, and the Gossip Girl reboot’s second season — plays up John’s insecurities rather effectively, however underwritten they may be.
As for Feña’s other two strained relationships, Mutt doesn’t quite know how to mold them into anything beyond perfunctory familial clichés. Zoe falls under the one-note trope of precocious/rebellious younger sibling, while Pablo acts as the ignorant boomer parent who loves his child but whose very limited understanding of gender clashes with his son’s, leading to a fierce argument in which Feña tries desperately to explain himself while also delineating how exhausting it is to explain himself. Their subplot culminates in an ending that, while sweet and forgiving, feels like an unearned cop-out, a predictable resolution that seems more concerned with neatly wrapping everything up as opposed to reaching an organic conclusion. We do get brief slivers of other people in Feña’s life, like his roommates Fiona (Jari Jones) and Aidan (Jasai Chase-Owens), but they mostly function to dole out advice and support and not much else.
Perhaps what’s most exasperating about Mutt is that we learn very little about the protagonist himself. Aside from the constant misgendering and deadnaming Feña faces, we know that he’s a fish out of water and not just because there’s a scene where Zoe accidentally breaks a fish bowl and Feña has to fetch the fish before it dies. We understand that he hates being reminded of his life pre-transition and not just because there’s a scene of him using a tampon pad to soak up the blood from a subway turnstile-related injury.
Beyond these contrived episodes that bluntly signal his desire to be accepted and affirmed for his identity, what are Feña’s other aspirations? What other fears does Feña have besides the casual and explicit transphobia with which he regularly comes into contact? During one scene late in the film, John tells Feña that people don’t like him because he’s an asshole, not because he’s trans. What is the emotional truth there if Mutt doesn’t show Feña being an asshole? For a movie that tries to honor the humanity and complexity of its main character, there’s disappointingly very little interiority and dimension to latch onto.
For better or worse, Lungulov-Klotz’s sharp eye and cinematographer Matthew Pothier’s striking static camerawork do a lot of the heavy lifting, bringing texture, warmth, and contrast to a story lacking palpable resonance. Several of Mutt’s beautiful Academy ratio compositions, such as a tight overhead shot of Feña vomiting in a janky bathroom, evoke Feña’s isolation as a trans man, showing how both public and private spaces can be suffocating for someone who is frequently boxed in and made to feel small by society.
Even with strong visuals, Mutt’s mostly stationary images ironically reflect its own dramatic inertia. The film technically moves forward and yet, other than a few emotionally intense conversations and aggravating run-ins, it feels like not much happens. That Mutt doesn’t realize the full potential of its premise shouldn’t disqualify its importance nor impede other trans-led films from getting made. But considering the material here, we may still have a while to go.
