Dogging: A Love Story

In purely technical terms, ‘Dogging: A Love Story’ offers every sign that director Simon Ellis could shape up into a smart, homegrown talent. He exhibits a keen eye for composition, is able to draw spiky, naturalistic performances from his young cast and is ready to experiment with editing and film stocks to augment the visual storytelling experience. It’s a crying shame, then, that all of this promise is squandered at the service of a grotty, outdated and limply provocative tale involving a group of jaded twentysomethings looking for kicks by having public sex in car parks. Set in Newcastle, it feels like an elongated Viz sketch without a punchline. We follow Luke Treadaway’s whiney journo as he finds his soulmate while penning an investigative report on the dogging phenomenon. Tonally, the film is a shambles, clumsily veering from cheeky romance one minute, to crass ‘that bloke just spunked on my windscreen!’ japery the next, and, in its trainwreck of a final reel that takes place at a huge dogging meet in the Lake District, settles for old-fashioned, plain unwatchable.