The Pet

While in no sense a pornographic movie the male lead’s wealth and ease and the female lead’s instant just-add-a-collar submissiveness give The Pet the simple-minded wish fulfillment qualities of a porn movie. Not to mention the disorientingly abstracted quality of the performances: you feel they could be addressing their lines to empty rooms.

Grieving over the death of his Irish terrier, Philip sends scouts out looking for a nice young woman to take the dog’s place. They discover Mary selling flowers and after a bit of sweet-talk and a couple of large checks agrees to trying living as his human pet for two days.

As a pet Mary is called GG - “good girl.”

She drops too readily and uncomplicatedly into the role for it to convince. The pyramidal metal cage is sexy. The metal shock collar is worrying. Even though I’ve been excited by the idea like every other masochist who saw them in an episode of the original Star Trek ( The Gamesters of Triskelion, which inspired the tripartite BDSM emblem.) But the movie doesn’t hint at the risk such devices entail.

When her two days end Mary is offered the chance to return and sign a six month TPE contract in exchange for a half million dollars. Running into her worthless, abusive boyfriend is enough to convince her to return to her cage and leash.

As a pet GG spends most of her sleeping between walks. Good thing otherwise spending all that time in a cage doing nothing would be very boring. Perhaps as Mary she wasted her days watching Ophra so incessant idleness doesn’t diminish her quality of life.

Mysteriously she seems to have an on / off switch and it is as if she stops functioning when not out of the cage. More like a robot than life form.

Proud of his new acquisition Philip decides to show her off to friends in Utah. They prove to be a group of slavers who kidnap people to work in mines and be harvested for body parts. Since Philip is supposed to be a nice guy he doesn’t approve of this but his ethics don’t interfere with his wish to be sociable.

He loses the red token that serves as his title to GG. One of the slavers finds it and put GG up for sale. Exactly why someone who is a part of a major criminal enterprise would risk offending someone as rich as Philip isn’t clear. Boys will be boys I guess.

The bad guys aren’t allowed to make off with GG but she get injected with a pain killer that is also a slow acting poison and dies. Maybe. Or Maybe not. By now the film is so mired in ambiguity it is hard to swear what all is going on.

The film concludes with a short summary of the problem of real human trafficking. Perhaps to defuse attacks on sensual D/s.

The story is as ill proportioned as much homebrew web erotica. You could believe they just made it up as they went along. Perhaps much of the footage ended up on the cutting room floor and with better editing The Pet would’ve been more coherent or at least satisfactorily paced.

Watch the film with the intent of taking out of it whatever images appeal to you, overall the movie beautiful or moving.