Denali is a love letter that conveys a lifetime with a wave of feeling but without ever reaching for emotion.
USA
5*
Director:
Ben Knight
Screenwriter:
Ben Knight
Director of Photography:
Skip Armstrong
Running time: 8 minutes
It is rare for voice-overs to be deployed successfully. But Ben Knight’s Denali is rare in many ways.
It may be the most beautiful eulogy that has ever been written on film. All of 8 minutes in length, including credits, it looks back over a lifetime filled with comedy and tragedy. But in large part, it’s an adventure, a shared experience of a bond that is as strong as anything we can imagine. When the identity of the narrator was unexpectedly revealed about a minute into the film, tears started streaming down my face and didn’t stop until the closing credits rolled, at which point I was literally gasping for breath. The voice-over narration belongs to the title character, Denali, who (not which) is a 14-year-old mutt.
Of course, it’s a human being reading the lines. But that is also the point. Most people have animals as pets, but few have them as part of an active life in which they serve as loving companions, fellow adventurers and compassionate co-survivors. Denali’s friend and owner is adventure photographer Ben Moon, who got the dog in his mid-20s and has spent his entire adult life with Denali by his side.
This life includes a great deal of time spent on the beach but also in hospital as Moon struggled with but ultimately survived a bout of cancer, a period during which his insurance company kicked him off his plan (after all, the story takes place in the USA). Denali’s emotional intelligence lies in its knowledge that we want to see what we believe to be true. We believe that our pets – especially our dogs – can sense how we feel, that they understand us without us needing to tell them and that they care for us no matter what happens.
“When someone you love walks through the door, even if it happens five times a day, you should go totally insane with joy”, the narrator tells us. It serves as a reminder that many of us already have this kind of love in our lives and should recognise it more often. It may seem like the act of a simpleton – of someone who cannot remember the past and does not consider a future in which the affection is not returned. But it is as pure an expression as one can imagine of life-giving love that soars the heights of Denali’s namesake, the highest mountain in North America.
Unsurprisingly, given the title and the fact that one of the world’s best-known outdoor clothing brands provided half the budget, every single image looks like a crisp painting and offers a direct link to nature. The voice-over is delivered nearly monotonously and yet, it is deeply moving. Human but different, it stands in perfectly for the quasi-human thoughts of a dog.
Denali is not just a film for those who have lost pets they loved. Nor is it even for those who have ever had pets. It is a film for anyone who has ever had an intimate relationship with anyone or anything. If you have lost that person or that animal, this is for you; if you have ever been scared of losing him or her or it or them, this is for you; if you are human, this film is for you.