Togo

The Geography of Devotion

I’ve never been fully comfortable with movies about dogs. Most of them come at your emotions like they’re collecting a debt, leaning on the music and the lighting until resistance feels pointless. But Ericson Core’s *Togo* is after something more specific. It isn't only about an animal; it's about a particular breed of stubbornness. Released quietly to streaming, this account of the 1925 Nome serum run feels oddly out of step with the current studio machine in the best way. It's tactile, restrained, and stubbornly grounded. Nick Allen at RogerEbert.com called it "a smart, affectionately made tale about an underdog and his musher", which gets close. What really holds it together, though, is how hard the film leans into the bodily fact of surviving snow, wind, and exposure.

The camera in *Togo* has no interest in prettifying Alaska. Core, serving as his own cinematographer, shoots the storm sequences less as majestic winter panoramas than as punishing, disorienting confinement. You can almost feel your skin crack from the cold.



And then there is Willem Dafoe’s face. Critics have been talking for years about those sharp, severe features—Janet Maslin once called it his "perfectly villainous face" in an early review—but here the lines and angles read differently. They become the record of a man weathered into tenderness. Dafoe plays Leonhard Seppala with the stiff bearing of someone who has spent a lifetime leaning into brutal wind. He is not a man who gives softness away easily. Late in the film, after the serum run is over, a grateful father comes to thank him. Seppala can barely meet his eyes. His attention keeps sliding instead toward the hearth, where his spent dog is lying down. Dafoe's physical choices there—the drop in his shoulders, the faint shake in his hands—do all the work. You understand at once how suddenly he has grasped what he nearly lost. (I still don't quite know how Dafoe gets that much guilt and love across without a word, but maybe that is what happens when a great actor is put in real cold and asked to mean it).

The dog is remarkable too. It probably doesn't hurt that Diesel, who plays Togo, is actually descended from the real dog.



When the team crosses the breaking ice of Norton Sound, the suspense works because the film trusts the material reality of the sled and the dogs. You see the lines pull tight. You see the animals claw for traction. Core shot much of this practically in Alberta at punishing elevations, and the difference is obvious. The sled has heft when it cuts across the snow, a kind of resistance that CGI almost never gets right. Julianne Nicholson, as Seppala's wife Constance, brings the film the warmth it needs. She is the one who recognizes something in the runt puppy when Seppala is ready to write him off. Nicholson wisely sidesteps the dutiful-spouse cliche and gives Constance a dry, knowing patience instead. Watch her watching Seppala fail to keep that puppy in the kennel. She already understands where this is going before he has the slightest clue.

I do wonder whether a movie like this could still make it in theaters. Probably not.



There is something unmistakably old-fashioned about *Togo*, and I mean that as praise. It's a film that still believes in the dignity of labor, the violence of nature, and the quiet ache of loving a creature whose life will always be much shorter than yours. By the end, it has done more than recount a historical episode; it has traced the strange, silent shape of devotion itself. You leave feeling frozen to the bone and, somehow, warmed all the way through.