The opening scenes of “Shadow of a Dog,” a brief documentary by Sean Paulsen and Brad Wickham, seem like something from a movie noir. Sirens whine in the background; informants call with pointers; shots of run-down cityscapes recommend the isolation of life on the lam. But Jim Tierney, the hardboiled investigator on the case, is not trying to find a perp. He’s trying to find a puppy.
Tierney, who runs a pet-care service by day, calls himself an user-friendly family pet tracker—not a “dogcatcher,” a term that, Paulsen mentioned when we spoke, has an air of cartoonish villainy. Pet owners and rescue companies get in touch with Tierney for help, offering any details they can about a missing out on dog’s most likely location. Then, equipped with numerous night-vision path cams, a big cage, and a generous cache of hot dogs, Tierney starts nighttime surveillances around New York City.
Paulsen very first come across Tierney by method of an algorithm: video footage from among Tierney’s path cams turned up on the filmmaker’s Instagram, and he acknowledged the rescued dog from “Missing” posters that he’d seen in his community. Paulsen and Wickham started accompanying Tierney on cases, and shot “Shadow of a Dog” in the course of a month in the Evergreens Cemetery, on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, while on the hunt for a runaway terrier mix called Chica. When dawn would get here without any leads, the trio would pull away to Tierney’s car to debrief. “He would just say, ‘You know, this is kind of the point at which often someone—even if it’s their dog—they lose hope. It’s just really emotionally difficult for them to deal with,’ ” Paulsen informed me. “But that’s really when Jim buckles down.”
Runaway dogs usually hide throughout the day, therefore Tierney performs his searches by night. Depending on where a dog was last spotted—a building website, a commercial zone, an airport tarmac—there can be a vigilante element to his method. Tierney’s accustomed to crawling under fences and overlooking “Do Not Enter” indications. He generally handles to escape prior to dawn, however whenever he contends the authorities the fact is his finest defense. “There’s something about being able to say, honestly, ‘We’re looking for a lost dog’ that just feels like a get-out-of-jail-free card,” Paulsen said.
The movie’s drama develops not from discussion, of which there’s little, however from Tierney’s motions in the shadows, his disappointments and peaceful decision accentuated by Paulsen’s adventurous, haunting rating. In the rough black-and-white video footage from the path webcams, we view Tierney coming to grips with the cage, even climbing up into it sometimes, like a few of the other nighttime burglars captured on tape. In broader shots, we see him stalking through the metropolitan wilderness as the L train rumbles by and Manhattan illuminate the horizon. As Wickham put it, “He’s tracking these animals; we’re kind of tracking him through the city.” The story, at its core, is “so simple,” he included. It’s a tale of dogged pursuit.
