High school is an intense time. Not just because it is the cliff between childhood and adult responsibilities, and not just because it is a time in your life when you are completely surrounded by peers who are all absolutely saturated in a chemistry set’s worth of hormones, but also because everything suddenly feels like it is bigger than it actually is. Simple things like school dances become The Prom or stupid mistakes become Decisions That Ruin Your Future. The capitalization of that era adds suffocating weight to the day-to-day, and some kids cannot see beyond that brief four years. Therapy Dogs was made by an exceptionally young filmmaker. Whether the film is self-indulgent or poetic – or both – is up to the audience, but it is hard to deny the frozen snapshot it takes of the varied feelings in high school. 

Director/ co-writer Ethan Eng and co-writer Justin Morrice star in the mostly handheld-shot feature, which they captured during their senior year of high school. Much like the characters in the film, they told classmates that the footage was for a yearbook project, and much like the students in the film, their classmates were happy to mug for the camera without too many questions.

The film is executive produced by Matthew Miller and Matt Johnson, who made the tonally similar The Dirties in 2013. Both The Dirties and Therapy Dogs aim to reflect an unromanticized view of modern high school experiences, but The Dirties has a hair more plot. 

Frankly, that is saying a lot. This is not to say that there is no thematic escalation or a complete lack of cohesive characterizations, but Therapy Dogs will disappoint anyone in the audience who is looking for anything resembling a story or character arc. The film mostly exists alongside these boys as they float through their last year of high school. 

Therapy Dogs never argues that Justin or Ethan have it bad at school, nor that they have it great. If anything, they are going along with a middling experience without significant trauma or celebration. However the thread weaving throughout the film is Ethan’s inability to look at his life beyond high school. 

It is not that Ethan is without talent or interests- he is making a movie after all- but he does seem to ruminate on what is beyond. Beyond the school, beyond his town, beyond graduation. It is not an overwhelming sense of dread nor a hopeful dream of opportunity, but rather an inability to think beyond the confines of his own life. 

This common refrain rings true with the high school experience portrayed on screen. Occasionally the boys get hurt or get in trouble, but none of it is especially significant. In one easy to overanalyze moment, they take turns punching a locker. With every blow they look to see if the flat, painted metal is dented and how injured their knuckles are from the hit. Are they making a mark on the world, or is the world making a mark on them?

Without trying to be dismissive of this honest experience Eng translates to screen, Therapy Dogs is also quite self-indulgent. There is truly nothing remarkable about any of the characters and (nearly) all of their experiences. This is not to say that there is no value in capturing everyday life, but the film never makes a plea for us to pay too much attention or invest heavily into the emotions and lives of the characters. For the most part, it keeps the audience at an arm’s length and merely assumes that all of us will find their high school experience as interesting as they do. 

Even with this sentimentality, there is something at the core of Therapy Dogs that is worth paying attention to. Perhaps it is the balance of nostalgia and awareness that make it easy not to think that Eng is taking it all too seriously. That is quite the trickshot for a first time filmmaker of any age.