Sundog
“It’s not a sun. It’s just the light coming through the ice.”
There is a real industry that will write your life into an encyclopedia for a monthly fee. Ryan Koval, fifty-three, restocks shelf brackets at a hardware store in Nanaimo and has the mid-tier package. It takes three credit cards to pay for it.
At two in the morning, the history of his band goes up — paragraphs, subheadings, a whole past where there wasn’t one.
It stays up for four minutes.
Ryan photographs the screen before it disappears. Then he drives north to a Finnish co-operative island in British Columbia, carrying a selfie stick and a light that does nothing in daylight, to find the only other surviving member of a band that never quite happened — and ask him for six days.
Marc Hakala has worked the counter of the island store for eleven years. There is a members’ vote on February twelfth. When it carries, he becomes the manager.
He says yes to Ryan anyway.
The film never explains why, and it is not withholding an answer: there isn’t one, and both men would be worse off if there were.
They don’t get where they’re going.
What they get is a border refusal over a quarter ounce of marijuana from 1997, an immigration retainer paid in twenties out of somebody else’s till, a producer who does facilities two days a week at a community college, and a single kind sentence that costs Marc eleven years of his life — spoken by a decent man who never raises his voice and never finds out what he’s done.
Sundog is a dry comedy about the difference between having a life and having a record of one.
It is set in February, in the rain, in a town founded by people who crossed an ocean to build a society with nobody over them and went bankrupt inside four years.
Nobody in the film behaves badly.
A man loses everything anyway.
