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I'd give a lot for a crime-free thriller instead, but No Dogs Allowed tells a lot of truth about a young pedophile's life
Bly Rede is a former co-director of Virtuous Pedophiles. Blog posts reflect his personal views, and are not statements from the organisation.
The most affecting moment for me in this film comes when 15 year old Gabo, unable to cope any more with the mounting complexities of his situation, dissolves into hopeless tears in front of his sister, repeating four times "I can't take any more."
I doubt there is a single pedophile who has not reached this point at some stage - or at many stages in their life. Eli's eventual reply, "you remain my brother. I love you." is the kind of thing we all hope to hear when we explain ourselves. Few of us get to hear it.
Where other films about non-offending pedophiles have chosen to illustrate the situation with a grown adult male, director Steve Bache and writer Stephan Kämpf have chosen instead to focus on a 15 year old boy who knows he is sexually and romantically attracted to younger boys, prepubescents. It remains the case that most people do not realise that pedophiles tend to realise their attractions this early, and yet those of us who run support communities for non-offending pedophiles hear over and over that someone worked it out when they were around 14.
Cannily fitting the story into the genre of a police procedural, the film fully explores what this means for Gabo. Unfortunately he has not reached out to a community of 'virtuous pedophiles', as has been possible for those under 18 since 2016. While he calls the helpline of a prevention organisation, they are unsuccessful in getting him fully engaged. Instead, he develops a friendship with a pro-contact, offending pedophile, Dave.
A moral binary
Dave is here as a necessary foil to the innocent Gabo. Just as in The Woodsman (2004), where Kevin Bacon's flawed former offender achieves audience sympathy by rescuing a young girl from a currently offending pedophile, Gabo here gains sympathy through contrast with the cynical groomer Dave.
It means that in a later scene when Gabo's (highly plausible) text chats describing his feelings for the younger brother of a schoolfriend are read aloud, while they will make most mainstream audiences wince with discomfort and disgust, they at least have some context that helps them realise that having and verbalising desires is not on a par with a contact crime - for they have seen an actual crime committed, for comparison.
For those of us familiar with the whole range of pedophiles, boiling us down to two avatars: innocent and evil does seem reductive, but it is not untruthful. I myself have spoken to several pedophiles who as teenagers ventured into the company of older pedophiles and were taken advantage of sexually, as Gabo is here. Fortunately this is not usually, or even often the case.
Other reviewers have questioned the frankness of some of the scenes depicting abuse. Carlo Krammling as Gabo was of age when all the scenes were filmed, but they are surprisingly raw for the current era. It remains a difficulty of abusive sexual situations how demurely they should be illustrated. The trouble is that when you hear a character describe what happened, rather than see some level of detail, then as an audience member, you are more likely to supply your own detail based on prejudices about what a man like Dave might do. I think the film gives enough detail to show that his attempts to persuade Gabo are wrong and distressing for Gabo, while making sense of why Gabo doesn't resist at every stage or cease to see Dave.
I'm not sure this will make anybody happy to know, but most exclusive pedophiles would not be aroused by these scenes, since pedophiles by definition are attracted to pre-pubescent children instead.
The film also covers the complications of image sharing, where Gabo has shared a picture of the boy he most desires with Dave - one which later ends up in the hands of law enforcement. This proves the key piece of data that pulls Gabo deep into a situation that unravels with its own momentum and which reduces him to the state of hopelessness in the climactic emotional scene.
What does this reveal to the wider public?
Is this film a step forward for our visibility? Absolutely. I can't think of a mainstream release with this quality of script that has been fairer to us to date. The honest relating of true to life situations—how Gabo chats about his friend's brother and his private moments with images of the boy—would be very uncomfortable for me to sit and watch in a cinema full of "normies", but I cannot argue that they are sensationalised. They are not.
The question remains how many non-pedophiles can find any of this understandable. In recent years every time someone has entered mainstream attention while acknowledging our humanity, they have faced determined and furious backlash. It happened to Allyn Walker, and perhaps it will happen to these guys.
On the other hand, the film is a German language release, and seems to contain very little visually that could easily be weaponised in the culture wars. The scenes are not hasty; the dialogue is not sassy; there is not the same effort as in current wide-audience content to embed gif-able moments to drive engagement. Hopefully the film's thoughtfulness and steady pacing will help it get attention only among those with the attention span to watch it through and evaluate it calmly. But we shall see.
How does the story continue?
What story is next? I would like to see a character like Gabo in the context of other young people like him. There is a feint at this in No Dogs Allowed, but whether the other young man is a pedophile is never explicitly discussed.
It seems to me that part of what makes Gabo's situation nightmarish is that his options for social contact with anyone who "gets" him are so limited. Real-life Gabo would not have Dave as his only option, and most of the younger pedophiles I know are instead reaching out to their peers. When they do so in the context of anti-contact communities and networks, then their stories are far less likely to end up in conversations with lawyers, police, defence counsels, and instead in quiet, non-offending happiness.
Film makers won't get a crime thriller out of that, but really, I've never been a fan of crime thrillers anyway.
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