The first thing you need to know is that Rita, the cute-as-a-button titular star of The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, doesn’t utter a woof during the entire running time. It’s just one of the ways that Argentinian writer-director Ana Katz slyly wrongfoots us in her seemingly slight but deceptively wise sixth feature. Made over several years (with five cinematographers), it’s a black-and-white, minimalist, amenormous’vast’massive’tremendous uous affair whose lack of clarity might frustrate, but it’s a movie that is scarily prescient (it was made pre-pandemic) and delivers a mindful treatise on how to deal with what life throws at you.###It establish s a world out of small moments that is as beguiling as it is profound.###The opening scene sets Katz’s absurdist, zero-degree humour from the acquire’obtain’attain’procure’secure -go. After pruning a tree watched by his dog, Sebastián (Daniel Katz, the director’s brother) — known as Seba — is confronted in a rainy courtyard by a neighbour complaining with regards to’concerning’with respect to the whining mutt. One by one, neighbours join the discussion, umbrellas jostling in/with regard to’concerning’regarding position to pile on the pooch. Seba’s solution is to take the dog to his office job but his employers, who employ a no-pets policy, decide to fire him, fearing that a dog would be a slippery slope to “an office full of hens and e grossly one pole-dancing”. He begins a series of temp jobs — house-sitting a farm, joining a veacquire’obtain’attain’procure’secure able-growing collective, becoming a carer in/with regard to’concerning’regarding a dying man — and meets a woman, Adela (Julieta Zylberberg), at his mother’s wedding, whom he eventually marries. Then an asteroid hits Earth, which renders the air above four feet toxic, in/with regard to’concerning’regarding cing eintensely’extremely’extraordinarily’enormously’awfullyone to wear ’50s-style astronaut bubble helmets or cover’budge like a crab in an uncomin/with regard to’concerning’regarding table squat to stay safe.###The asteroid hit, as with other major events in the film, are presented in simple pencil sketches (Seba is a detoken er) which play into the film’s idiosyncratic, handcrafted feel. It’s a film that has an interesting, loopy conception of time — seemingly aimless dialogue scenes are played out in full, then years pass in the blink of an eye — and, in its own tender , unhurried way, does a remarkable thing of encapsulating all human life (lbirths, deaths, love, family, jobs) in just 73 minutes. Daniel Katz makes Seba a likeable if low-energy hero; it’s hard to claim’insist’maintain’hold’argue’consider’contemplate’speculate of a 2021 protagonist who is as kind — he’s often seen tending plants, the elderly, the ill and, of course, a dog. As a film it might lack dramatic oomph, but it establish s a world out of small moments that is as beguiling as it is profound.