Review: Dog 51 – Old dog, a few new tricks

Directed by Cédric Jimenez
Starring Gilles Lellouche, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Louis Garrel

6.5/10

We’re seven years after the date setting of the original Blade Runner, and the themes of cyberpunk are arguably more applicable than ever. It’s interesting to see a French tilt at the genre, as they contributed one of the proto examples of said genre in Alphaville. Based on a 2022 cyberpunk novel of the same name (by Laurent Gaudé ), Dog 51 is a captivating study in how far the genre has come in the decades since.

In a dystopian future, Paris is a segregation city along social and economic boundaries with control for police and the barriers turned over to a powerful Artificial Intelligence, ALMA. When the creator of that machine is murdered, two investigators (Adèle Exarchopoulos and Gilles Lellouche) from different zones are paired up to solve the case.

A competent procedural action film with a tinge of near future cyberpunk to add spice. What makes Dog 51 notable is how small those sci-fi elements are, as they extrapolate from modern technology, and don’t take those extrapolations too far. This is a future dystopia that feels frightfully plausible given social, political, and technological trends. All of which adds a tinge of menace to the film, a looming inevitability that makes it more believable than many franchises set in the present (Bond, Fast and Furious, Mission Impossible). That makes for some thought provoking viewing.

Unfortunately, it can’t stick the landing. Dog 51 sets up an intriguing premise, intriguing characters, well set action pieces, and ends it with a hackneyed conclusion. Anyone with a small degree of genre savvy can see where the plot is heading, and the incoming twist. As such, Dog 51 abandons a strong narrative in favour of emotional impact, and is mildly successful in this regard. However if it was combined with a plot that was a fraction as strong as the world building, atmosphere, and acting this film would have been truly something. Given the way that Dog 51 is able to consistently play with action tropes to produce unexpected results, this is perplexing.

Still, Gilles Lellouche and Adèle Exarchopoulos do make intriguing protagonists. Both are burnt out by the job, one masking with familiarity while the other hides behind cold professionalism. Seeing them trying to break through their respective armour is some of the best drama of the film and helps with that emotional ending, even if at times reading the depth of that relationship is up for individual interpretation.

At the end of the day, the sum of Dog 51 parts is greater than the whole, but it’s still an intriguing piece of cyberpunk cinema that’s not quite Hollywood (in the best possible way), even as it aspires to be.

DAVID O’CONNELL

Dog 51 is screening as part of the Alliance Française French Film Festival, which runs from Thursday, March 12, until Wednesday, April 15, 2026. Tickets are on sale now from lunapalace.com.au