REVIEW: ‘Mutt’ Is A Nuanced Trans Slice-Of-Life

There’s a prevailing trope in queer media, especially in trans media, that if the central character has a bad home life, it means their whole family is rotten. Maybe if they’re lucky, there’s one golden member who looks out for them or breaks away to protect them. Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s Mutt breaks that trope completely. In one long and difficult day, Feña (Lio Mehiel) encounters his ex-boyfriend John (Cole Doman), his half-sister Zoe (MiMi Ryder), and his father (Alejandro Goic), all of whom he hasn’t seen since before he transitioned.

Mutt is a simple movie. There’s no big, major plotline with goals to accomplish or particular challenges to overcome. It’s just a day in the life of Feña as he runs into or meets up with people he hasn’t seen in a long time. There aren’t necessarily any expectations being set for how these encounters will go aside from the preconceptions we might come into the archetypes of these relationships having already formed. There are a lot of familiar beats to the three relationships at hand. Things are obviously precarious, but they’re also portrayed with great nuance.

Feña and John clearly have a long and storied history. The movie carefully explores what it can mean to be on either side of a relationship pre-transition and the possible avenues for both pain and joy that can come from its possibilities. By no means does the movie try to impart definitely rightness or wrongness onto either character, instead opting to show that people hurt people and it doesn’t have to necessarily be anybody’s fault. Even when we’re aggrieved and feel our former partners have no right to reciprocate, Mutt explores what it means to sit in the difficult reality of those feelings.

Feña and Zoe have a dynamic that really starts to make clear the subversion of the aforementioned familial tropes. When she first shows up, the mentions she makes of their shared mother are daunting. The two of them have to live with that shared pain in different ways, but there’s also a great sweetness in watching them bond over this pain. They’ve spent too long apart from one another to truly grasp all of the particulars of their separate experiences in one afternoon, but their rapid re-bonding is wonderful to witness.

Feña and his dad then become the icing on the cake. If Mutt has one leading tension it’s Feña’s quest to procure a car to pick up his dad from the airport after several years apart. It leaves you with a lingering expectation for the first two-thirds that this isn’t going to be a happy reunion, or at the least, that it’s going to be quite tense. And to a degree, it is. But it’s also the most sensitive and moving part of the movie as well. This relationship is where the script flips the hardest on whether movies train us to assume that all queer folks are hated by their estranged families or not. Maybe sometimes we also self-isolate out of fear. Maybe sometimes we drift apart from people for different, unrelated reasons. And maybe it’s okay to drift back together after so long. And maybe sometimes it isn’t.

Mutt does a very good job taking us through a day in the life of somebody whose struggles with having recently transitioned are, at times, more in his own head than anybody else’s. There are perfect little moments where you see that he has a really strong support system and that the majority of the world around him isn’t thinking twice about his gender or him at all. I love the way it pokes fun at Feña for self-aggrandizing a bit too hard at times while, of course, still walking us through the very real and very liminal struggles he endures in just a single day or so.

Dragging a little here and there and a bit too dimly lit at night, Mutt is a great example of what trans slice-of-life fiction can be when it’s real without being overly traumatic.

Mutt screened as part of Outfest LA 2023 and comes to theaters August 18th.