Baxter Maxime Leroux, a bull terrier, is torn from his pens and handed to an elderly woman, Madame Deville. He recoils from the dull rhythm of her daily life and fixes his attention on the lively couple across the street, watching their nightly intimacy with a strange mix of curiosity and hunger for control. What begins as a quiet observation soon drifts into a want to dominate the old woman and bend the small world around him to his will, a strategy that backfires in unsettling and brutal ways.
When Baxter attempts to assert his will by causing the old woman to stumble, the maneuver backfires in a cruel twist of fate. The old woman’s health begins to decline, and the vulnerable situation spirals toward tragedy, culminating in Baxter’s desperate act of murder so that he can be adopted by the young couple. This shift marks a disturbing turn: the dog’s life becomes entwined with the couple’s fragile happiness, a fragile equilibrium that Baxter relentlessly tests.
With his new guardians, Baxter rides a precarious line between affection and menace. He divides his days between the sensual woman and the earthy man, delivering dead animals as a stark, unsettling display of his identity. Yet the domestic idyll is fragile. The couple soon welcomes a baby, and Baxter’s place within their household shifts again as neglect creeps in. He senses the child as a new source of weakness and vulnerability, and his hatred for the helpless infant grows. In a brutal miscalculation, he attempts to harm the baby, only to see his plans collapse once more. The couple, unaware of Baxter’s deeper intentions, ultimately rehome him with a neighborhood boy, Daniel Rialet who appears to be catching hold of something darker in himself.
The new master is a budding sociopath with a fixation on power and brutality, a persona that increasingly mirrors disturbing echoes from a far darker past. He fantasizes about Eva Braun, a thread that threads through his unsettling imagination as he encounters a girl from his school who mirrors that imagery. The girl, named Veronique, enters the story as a presence that unsettles the boy and deepens Baxter’s complicated place in this household. Veronique’s presence tangles with Baxter’s own identity in a way that foreshadows the looming violence, a tension that Dumonts the air with a cold, clinical menace. Ève Ziberlin lends Veronique a striking, uneasy presence that intensifies the boy’s fixation.
Baxter’s new life under the boy’s firm and increasingly unstable rule is set against a troubling cycle of reproduction and control. The dog impregnates the girl’s spaniel, a detail that underscores Baxter’s uneasy sexuality as he confronts mortality and desire within a human world that profits from fear and obedience. The spaniel gives birth to puppies, a moment that elicits mixed feelings in Baxter and magnifies the boy’s fascination with power and domination. In a brutal act mirrored by the boy, the puppies are killed, which cements Baxter’s conclusion that the boy must die to ensure his own survival and status within this warped hierarchy. When the boy commands Baxter to heel, the dog finds his autonomy impossible to resist, a cruel twist that allows the boy to turn the table and end Baxter’s life.
In the aftermath, the boy prowls an abandoned house where he observes the couple across the street, his narration taking on a Baxter-inspired severity. He harbors a dangerous monologue—an ending echoing Baxter’s own dark philosophy—about killing his parents and forcing a controversial adoption by the couple. The film closes on a chilling note, with the boy’s deadly resolve leaving viewers with a stark meditation on influence, fear, and the monstrous potential that can lie within ordinary lives.
