Pitt, Odin, and the Kind of Love That Doesn’t Need Words

There are survival movies, and then there are survival movies that decide to take your heart out into the Alaskan snow and leave it there for a while, and Heart of the Beast is absolutely the second kind. 

David Ayer’s new one for Paramount, which reunites him with Brad Pitt after Fury, is a survival tale where Pitt plays a former Army Special Forces soldier who becomes stranded deep in the Alaskan wilderness alongside a dog, and that logline is so simple it almost undersells what the film actually does to you.

After a harrowing incident that Ayer wisely doesn’t over-explain, Pitt and his combat dog Odin find themselves cut off, no comms, no extraction, just white that goes on forever and a wind that sounds like it has opinions. 

What follows is a brutal, beautiful, almost wordless fight for survival against the elements, and it delivers the kind of stunning cinematography by Academy Award Winner Mauro Fiore that makes you forget you are warm in a cinema seat. Every ridge looks carved from glass, every breath Pitt takes hangs in the air a second too long, and you believe the cold because Pitt believes it. 

This is one of his most stripped-down performances in years, all desperation with no vanity, a man who has been trained to survive everything except having to rely on another living thing completely. 

And Odin, who should win every award we give to humans, is a scene-stealer in the truest sense. He doesn’t perform; he watches, he waits, he decides, and somehow, you understand exactly what he is thinking.

What captivated me from the first paw print in the snow was not the plot mechanics, because we have seen men vs. wilderness before, but the originality and the refreshing simplicity of this particular relationship between man and beast. 

I was very moved by this bond, and what was striking was the silent and often wordless exchange between Pitt and Odin. 

A look, a nudge, a shared piece of frozen ration, Pitt’s hand disappearing into that thick fur because it is the only warm thing left in Alaska. 

The human-canine bond resonates powerfully here because Ayer lets it breathe without speechifying it, and when the emotional payoffs come, and they do, it is a genuine tearjerker in the best, least manipulative way. 

You get emotional, not because the score tells you to, but because you have spent ninety minutes learning how these two say, ‘I need you’, without saying anything at all.

Yes, I will admit the middle stretch sags. The pacing turns sluggish around the second act, there are a couple of repetitive obstacles: a river crossing, then another river crossing, a storm then another storm, and some of the writing around it is bland when it tries to be more than Pitt and Odin figuring it out. 

But even that repetition starts to feel intentional, like wilderness itself is repetitive until it isn’t, and every time I thought I was getting restless, Odin would do something small and entirely dog-like that pulled me straight back in. 

I was captivated by the survival journey through those beautiful wilderness landscapes not because it is constantly surprising, but because it is constantly honest about how hard it is to keep going when there is nowhere to go.

Heart of the Beast is a heartwarming story about reliance in its purest form: a man and his dog with nothing left but each other, and it left me wrecked in that good way where you walk out wanting to pet every dog you see.

Showing in cinemas from Friday, 25 September.

-Dirk Lombard Fourie