Like American Beauty retold by Werner Herzog, Dog Days applies Seidl's documentary tools-long takes, portrait–like framings, nonprofessional actors-to a "fictional" narrative, one that for all its bizarre characters and obscene moments will leave one continually questioning what was true and what, if anything, was false. During the hottest days of an Austrian summer several characters boil toward six precise interactions, some lurid (an all–flesh–exposed orgy hidden within a suburban mall, the world's oldest striptease dancer), some darkly amusing (a divorced couple still living together, a chattery hitchhiker who rattles her drivers), all filmed with a clinical gaze more suited to a Diane Arbus photograph (or a study of diseases). Seidl's reconstructed reality merges actors with nonactors (the "swinger," for instance, is played by a Viennese porn magnate), the staged and the authentic. Suburban hell has never looked so brutal and disturbing, nor been imagined so memorably and so radically.