How’s this for some cosmic symmetry? In the early ‘80s, veteran animal trainer Karl Lewis Miller worked on a strange, Samuel Fuller-directed movie about a troubled canine called White Dog. Over thirty years later, Miller’s daughter Teresa Ann found herself in Budapest, doing the same job on another very odd film about a tormented hound—this one called White God.

“It’s something that was very meaningful for us,” says director Kornél Mundruczó, calling the Straight from Colorado after a screening of White God at the Sundance festival. “Same tradition; same training method; and the same empathy for dogs.”

Mundruczó’s title actually comes from J. M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel, Disgrace. “There is some sentence about ‘the white god’,” he explains, through a sometimes impenetrable Hungarian accent. “Which we are—we who are colonizing the whole world, and we think we are the ones who have always the power to do that.” Alluding to the film’s outlandish and unforgettable climax, he adds: “And this is also the perspective of the dog, and that’s why I choose this title.”

Delicious coincidences aside, both films do share a melodramatic impulse and outsized thematic ambition. In their own ways, both are stunning. Fuller’s film took on racism; for Mundruczó, his tale of a pet violently separated from its 13-year-old owner and trained to fight, among other painful indignities, has vast metaphorical reach—as the Straight’s Janet Smith notes in her rave review.

Both films also rely on our impulses as dog lovers, although Mundruczó was obviously dismayed by the reaction of Academy members who were unsettled by the Cannes prizewinner during private screenings in Los Angeles earlier in the year. (The film wasn’t nominated, predictably.)

“Who can imagine I do such cruelty?” he asks, with audible frustration. “This movie is against such cruelty. I clearly believe in equality between animals and humans.” Thankfully, the reception at Sundance was a little more sophisticated. “They understand clearly, nobody left the room, and it was really warm. It gives me a lot of hope. I’m quite positive now,” Mundruczó says.

The interesting part is that White God’s brutality is far more implied than explicit. Its impact really depends on Mundruczó leads—13-year-old Lili (Zsófia Psotta) and the two bear-like mongrels who play her best friend, Hagen. Psotta brings “innocence and rebel attitude”, but White God disturbs because those dogs are so damned expressive.

“In the beginning everybody thought you can’t do this movie without CGI,” says Mundruczó, whose search for the canine Olivier ended when he found the brothers Body and Luke in “a very poor neighbourhood” in Arizona. Their personalities are quite distinct—Luke is "playful and sensitive" while Body is “a thinker”—but the performance is seamless. No texture mapping required. "After the editing I remember who was who, but after a year, I don’t know which one is which,” says Mundruczó.