Sam Peckinpah directs Dustin Hoffman, Susan George and Peter Vaughan in this rural thriller where a nerdy mathematician and his restless wife come under threat from the unchecked aggression of the local men. 

A visceral experience that grows on me each time I watch it. My wife hit the nail on the head about its difficult reputation neutering the end product. The infamously troubling rape ordeal at its centre, that gave Straw Dogs a banned status in its home country for our entire youth, skews how you absorb a very unsettling thriller. You spend the first half ignoring Peckinpah’s astute portrait of a bullying atmosphere of toxic masculinity, waiting on tenterhooks for the inevitable sex attack to happen. When it does occur, it is an utterly gruelling sequence, but one that brushes uncomfortably with controversial moments that suggest enjoyment and some consent from the victim. And afterward it has so little effect on the home invasion finale as to feel like mere casual exploitation. Narratively, our ostensible “hero” Hoffman is never made aware of his wife’s trauma (even though there are hints he is being wilfully ignorant). And George’s mania is a more than understandable in-the-moment reaction to the lethal threat besieging their home and her husband’s out of character aggression to it, rather than as evidence of PTSD from the gang rape. So the controversial central set piece acts almost like a ironic lighthouse. It serves little narrative necessity but warns you of the dark, unsettling nature of Straw Dogs. Yet equally that overpowering scene blinds you on the first few watches as you sail too close into it, looking into its powerful bulb rather than taking in the jaggedness of the dangerous rock it is built on. The violent and bleak whole shares DNA with other classics of the time; the overpowering and bloody depiction of humanity of A Clockwork Orange, the unchecked threat of civilisation in isolation of The Wicker Man, the eerie use of horror evoking light and mist of The Fog, and the subverted Western form (Peckinpah’s genre of choice) of outnumbered white hats surrounded by marauders subverting the heroics of Shane or Rio Bravo. Hoffman is perfectly cast as the seemingly timid, rational man who loses control in the face of hostility and dominance. He proves as much a monster as the antagonists’ bullying and belittling his wife. When he finally snaps, his reaction to them, and brute authority of her, actually saves them. George (always shot with titillation in mind) puts in an ambiguous turn as an unhappy trophy wife. Struggling to find ways to get her ill-matched husband to engage with her, she exacerbates his insecurities and finds herself stirring up the less refined lusts of her old friends. It is a pessimistic portrait of a bad marriage in isolation. The savagery that eventually crosses their threshold accelerates the decline of their partnership but it is hard to see how the two would ever co-exist in isolation over much more time. Whether taken as a profane study of gender under accelerated conditions or a grim, nightmarish rollercoaster ride, Straw Dogs is an effective exercise in intent and execution.

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