The Dog Stars (2026)

There’s a shot early in The Dog Stars where Jacob Elordi’s Hig sits in the cockpit of a battered Cessna, waiting on a signal that probably won’t come, and the whole thin premise of the film settles into his face before a word of dialogue arrives. Ridley Scott, eighty-eight now, still knows how to frame stillness, and it’s easily the best trick he has here. He just doesn’t use it often enough.

Adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, the film drops us a few years after a pandemic has hollowed out the world. The neighbours didn’t survive. Hig lives in a Colorado airport hangar with his dog, Jasper, and a taciturn ex-military survivalist named Bangley (Josh Brolin), the two of them running a wary, efficient little economy of trust built on guns and silence. When a mysterious transmission crackles over the radio during one of Hig’s supply runs, it gives him a reason to fly further than either man has dared in years, toward whatever or whoever might still be out there.

What struck me, watching it, is how little urgency Scott brings to a story that is fundamentally about the loss of urgency, about two men who have talked themselves into believing that survival is the whole of a life. Elordi plays Hig with a kind of worn-down decency that never tips into sentimentality, and Brolin’s Bangley is the film’s most interesting creation, a man who has made peace with cruelty as a tool rather than a personality. It works. Margaret Qualley, when she arrives as Cima, brings a warmth the film badly needs and doesn’t quite know what to do with. Guy Pearce and Allison Janney turn up in smaller roles that hint at a richer film than the one we get.

Erik Messerschmidt’s cinematography does a lot of the emotional heavy lifting; the Colorado high country looks genuinely depopulated, genuinely cold, in a way that a lesser production would have faked with colour grading alone. But the pacing sags badly through the middle stretch, and a couple of the action beats feel obligatory, bolted onto a character study that didn’t need them. Less would have helped. I found myself wishing Scott had trusted his actors a little more, and his plotting a little less.

There’s a real film in here about what people owe each other once the social contract has burned down, and about the specific, quiet cowardice of choosing isolation and calling it prudence, but The Dog Stars only gestures at it. It’s handsomely made and honestly acted, and I don’t regret the two hours I gave it. Three days on, though, I find I’m not thinking about it much. A film this serious about the cost of survival ought to leave more of a mark than that. It doesn’t.