Mild spoilers for the film follow.
Back in 2005, Germany launched Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, a social initiative aimed at providing clinical support for people with pedophilic tendencies. The main objective was to prevent further cases of sexual abuse while creating a culture of self-reporting. Patients would undergo cognitive therapy behaviour while also taking pharmaceuticals designed to lower sex drive.
Steve Bache’s No Dogs Allowed (2024), playing in the First Feature Competition, stars Carlo Krammling as Gabo, a 15-year-old paedophile, completely self-aware of his affliction. He’s in love with his best friend’s 8-year-old brother and knows he should report himself to seek counselling such as Dunkelfeld, but instead finds himself communicating online with Dave (Robin Sondermann), an active hebephile (someone attracted to adolescents age 11-15).
The film presents a sort of binary situation — Gabo can seek help, and by doing so, come out to his family and friends about his paedophilia while receiving therapy, or keep it all a secret. The latter means he’ll be living a life of dangerous repressed desire that will most likely turn into very real abuse with real victims.
Look, paedophilia is a tough sell, especially stories centred around the paedophile’s POV — there’s a huge portion of the public that simply doesn’t want to see films on this subject, no matter how sensitively they are handled. For the bulk of its runtime, Dogs works as a surprisingly empathetic and non-judgemental character study. It mostly succeeds because he’s not yet an abuser, but still raises multiple concerns in terms of how much it shows.
As indicated in the press notes, the filmmakers appear to recognize the danger in recreating sexually abusive imagery involving minors…but then they go ahead and do it three times. A movie centred on a teenage paedophile is already a bold undertaking, and there’s nothing immoral or wrong with exploring the psychology of a character like Gabo… But there’s really no justification for actually showing him receiving oral sex, not once, but twice from a man who appears to be closer to 40. Krammling, the actor playing Gabo, is in his early 20s, but in the film, he’s 15, so we’re asked to watch “a teenager” engage in sexual acts with a much older man.
Another scene shows the two discussing how a perfectly innocent vacation photograph of a young boy and his father can be cropped and then be classified as legitimate child pornography… but then the director proceeds to show a cropped image of the child in a speedo.
While the premise of the scene — exploring the interpretation of photographs — is valid and not inherently problematic, the decision to show one image feels excessively provocative and raises questions. Was this necessary? Why are we seeing this instead of watching your characters simply discuss it?1A previous version of this review questioned the parent’s role in depicting a child in this way. That comment has been removed to reflect that this image is a digitally altered depiction of the director himself.
It brings to mind The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (Kristina Lindström, Kristian Petri, 2021), a doc that shows the lasting effect of casting children as objects of desire, and also an illegal movie download website that operates out in plain sight. At first glance, it looks like its focus is teenage films and coming-of-age narratives… but in the comments, you’ll find comments from predators timestamping the precise moments that minors are filmed shirtless or semi-nude or in scenarios that appear to be perfectly ordinary, but could be sexualised from a paedophiles point of view. No Dogs Allowed demonstrates an awareness of how this dark side of internet culture works — then regrettably seems to cater to it.
It’s unfortunate that these minor missteps threaten to derail an otherwise well-crafted and bold film, held together by Krammling’s poignant performance. Despite these flaws, Bache and his cast still achieve something remarkable by telling a story that feels impossible to tell.
Earl Peterson lives in Baltimore, Maryland