Relationships are give and take, they evolve over time, and they often take sacrifices on both sides. Sometimes, we need to compromise who gets to pick the movie at teatime, and others, you have a discussion over whether your other half's hobbies should include murder or not. The latter (hopefully) isn't relatable to anyone reading this review, but it's a warped concept explored in the wildly deranged and unpredictable thriller Sick Puppy, which enjoys its world premiere at FrightFest 2025.
Directed by Jay Reid, the provocative horror film follows Charlie (Natasha Calis), a calming and attentive vet who is beloved by her coworkers and patients alike. She is celebrating her anniversary with husband John (Brett Geddes), a gardener, and they appear to have the perfect suburban life. However, John is hiding a dark secret in the basement of their house, where he regularly imprisons, tortures, and murders young women. After a particularly brutal kill, he vows to use art as an outlet for his murderous tendencies, turning his back on the crimes he has implicated Charlie in. But when a figure from Charlie's past comes back into their lives, she finds herself intoxicated by blood lust while John struggles to keep his urges in check when taunted by a customer's teenage daughter.
Shocking from start to finish, Sick Puppy is a deliciously brutal and skin-crawling tale examining the lengths we will go to for love and the allure of extreme violence. The narrative consistently questions not only John's obsession with death and whether he could ever truly be reformed, but also Charlie's place in it all. Is she a victim of her killer husband, a woman with Stockholm Syndrome, or someone who has been warped into his way of thinking? Audiences are kept guessing throughout, thanks to the entrancing performances of Geddes and Calis, who switch from loving and attentive towards each other in one moment, to cool and calculated killers in the next.
While not as gory as those who tune in may expect, the truly disturbing elements of Sick Puppy come from the imprisonment of John's victims. Who he keeps in a cage before forcing them to walk around like dogs and urinate on the cold, concrete floor, acting out a conversation you would expect between two neighbours. This, as well as the suffocating fear Charlie experiences as their carefully executed crimes begin to unravel, makes for an edge-of-your-seat experience that is too horrifying to watch, but too thrilling to turn away from.
Dark and disturbing, Sick Puppy is a toxic tale of abusive relationships pushed to the extreme, in more ways than one. Among its true crime peers, it shines, taking the overwrought serial killer thriller narrative and showing it through a couple trying to navigate compromise and an evolving marriage. Their attitude in the film's opening that murder is just an annoying hobby that John can kick is chilling, and Sick Puppy never lets up from there as it delves into the deepest depths of depraved minds.
Sick Puppy had its world premiere at FrightFest 2025 on 25 August
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