You can do almost anything to a human being onscreen and we’ll sit still for it, but don’t mess with the dog. When young Lili’s father angrily throws her faithful pet mutt out of his SUV and speeds away just minutes into White God, getting to watch out the back window as he races up the highway, trying in vain to catch up, is likely the first gut check for any dog lover. Stick with Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó’s new film, though, and it’ll get better, though not for its four-legged lead.

Lili (Zsófia Psotta) is staying with her father, a scholar reduced to working in a slaughterhouse and still broken by his breakup with Lili’s mom. In Hungary, mixed-breed dogs must be registered, and he can’t afford the fee. Lili’s incipient teenage rebelliousness isn’t helping his disposition, either. And so Hagen, a sturdy shepherd/hound-ish mix, finds himself on the side of the highway, starring in a splice of Au hasard Balthazar and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. He is pursued by animal control and inducted into the dog-fighting underground. He battles for his life in the pit, in the streets, and later in a cage, as animal control finally catches up. And then he leads hundreds of his fellow mutts in a bloody citywide revolt.

You read that right, and it’s just one of the perplexing but hittable curveballs Mundruczó’s film throws. The intercut plot lines of Lili’s troubled coming of age and Hagen’s struggle to survive are handled with skill and naturalistic aplomb, thrown off only by the occasional burst of melodramatic score. And the cruelties life heaps on Hagen read as entirely plausible, though the dogs bark hello to each other like people instead of nuzzling butts like canines everywhere. The final riot in the streets surprises with a dip into horror gore, but even the metaphor about society’s treatment of its underclass that Mundruczó has been polishing the whole time can’t quite prepare you for a final scene of startling power. Odd, but worth watching.

Speaking of odd, Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja sends Viggo Mortensen out wandering the scrubby deserts of Argentina on a quasi-mystical quest. Sometime in the late 19th century, Mortensen’s Danish émigré is part of a military party bound for a remote fort when his teenage daughter (Viilbjørk Malling Agger) steals off with a young soldier. He spends the rest of the film wandering, meandering toward his doom and sinking into hallucinations. Or is it all a dream? Seriously, it might all be a dream. Alonso’s thoughtful realism and Mortensen’s heroic physical performance transfix even when the film itself serves up eyebrow-raising puzzlement.