Directing: B-
Acting: C+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

As soon as Russell (Daniel Doheny) arrives at the home of dog breeder Patti Kolb (Dot-Marie Jones) and he is introduced to her five pretty and highly intelligent daughters, you kind of see where the story is going a mile away. Honestly, I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t see it coming even sooner.

Breeder is neither particularly inept nor the most competent movie ever made, and even though it’s certainly not special enough for me to go shouting from the rooftops that people need to see it, I also don’t want to spoil the basic premise. This leaves me a bit unsure of what else to say about it. I can tell you that the opening scene reveals itself to be about something different than first assumed when reflecting on it later. I can also tell you the opening titles appear far later into this 98-minute film than they should, and the opening scenes are given plenty of time to set the stage for some minor pacing issues.

This is a film made with a budget of between $1-1.5 million, putting it in league with that of Obsession, an overrated film that is still decent and definitively superior to this one. There’s a bit of an irony to this film having an up to 50% higher budget. The edge that Breeder still has is a story concept it’s honestly surprising we haven’t seen in a wide release film before.

It also has Dot-Marie Jones, very deliberately cast an oddball woman, occupying a nebulous space between akward and creepy, who breeds miniature poodles. Breeder would not work even as well as it does without her, even though her delivery can be difficult to judge. Is this a stilted character, or a stilted performance? I want to credit writer-director Alex Goyette for the ambiguity there, but I honestly can’t tell if he deserves it.

The rest of the cast could easily have been cast with any number of average, unknown actors, which is by and large what they all are. Daniel Doheny is serviceable enough as Russell, who has his own creature interest: he has long been working on a research project involving the protection of bee colonies. We see him working with bees on a rooftop that easily reveals the shooting location to be Vancouver, B.C., although it is shot quite deliberately to make the city he lives in look gray and drab.

Russell struggles to get funding for his project, evidently just because he hasn’t earned a Ph.D. It’s not super clear why he hasn’t, but it does leave him desperate for funding, so when he gets a letter from Patti saying she’d like to fund his research and invites him to dinner at her farmhouse a five-hour drive away, he jumps at the chance. Russell’s suspicious girlfriend, Haley, is left behind; another mystifying narrative choice, except that it serves the relatively flimsy plot. It’s also a bit of a plot point that Haley is not an intellectual on the level of Russell, yet Tanaya Beatty still plays her as someone smart enough to be suspicious. I kind of wish her performance were on the same level.

To be fair Breeder is the kind of movie that can be an unfair representation of acting talent, depending on the budget and the director—honestly, all of these actors seem like they could be great in another project with greater resources. Still, it has a vibe it’s going for, and it certainly gets there. Breeder is in the horror genre, but only in the sense of its creepiness, which tends to tip the scales away from unsettling toward subtly comical. It gets through the plot fairly swiftly, and it does have a cleverly constructed conclusion, with sparingly but effectively deployed violence. In the end, I found this movie satisfying, albeit barely, as it moves across some shaky ground to get there.

*You may be wondering where the miniature poodles are.*

Overall: B-