Heart of the Beast Review: Brad Pitt’s Survival Thriller Is Carried by a Dog Named Odin

Cameron Alexander’s screenplay for Heart of the Beast landed on the 2017 Black List, the annual roundup of Hollywood’s most-liked unproduced scripts, and then sat there for the better part of a decade before anyone actually got around to filming it. David Ayer signed on to direct in March 2024, Brad Pitt joined the following January, and the two were reuniting for the first time since Fury back in 2014, trading a cramped Sherman tank for the open, unforgiving Alaskan wilderness. The result, in wide theatrical release as of September 25, follows retired Special Forces officer James Belmont (Pitt) and his equally retired combat dog Odin as a plane crash strands them both in the snow, forcing them to survive the elements and the local wildlife with nothing but each other.

At 101 minutes and a PG-13 rating, Heart of the Beast keeps things lean by design: this is essentially a two-hander between one very tired man and one very good dog, shot on location in Queenstown, New Zealand. Reviews have been largely positive so far, with the film currently holding an 88% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes alongside a 96% audience score. Here’s the full breakdown across our five categories (2 points maximum each).

Heart of the Beast Story – 1.5/2

Good Points: Simplicity, Emotional Stakes, Pacing

A Plane Crash, Then Silence
Belmont and Odin go down over the Alaskan interior in the film’s opening stretch, and from there Heart of the Beast strips its plot down to the essentials: find shelter, find food, stay alive, and keep the dog alive too. There’s no rescue-team subplot cutting away every ten minutes and no villain to outrun, just a man working through cold, hunger, and injury with a dog who increasingly seems like the only thing keeping him going. It’s a small, patient story, and the film trusts that smallness completely.

The Emotional Core
What keeps the survival mechanics from feeling repetitive is how deliberately the film ties every physical setback to the bond between Belmont and Odin. A shared history as a working military team is doled out in flashes rather than a clunky opening-credits montage, and by the time the back half leans hard into its most sentimental beats, it has earned the tears it’s clearly aiming for.

Where It Falls Short
Heart of the Beast doesn’t reinvent the survival-movie playbook, and it knows it: the broad shape, crash, isolation, a wound that won’t heal, a climactic gauntlet, will feel familiar to anyone who has seen a Cast Away or a Revenant. The film is more interested in executing that shape with sincerity than subverting it, and the middle stretch occasionally repeats the same beat of injury and recovery once too often before the story finds its final gear.

Heart of the Beast Cast – 2/2

Special Praise: Pitt and Uber

A Mostly Wordless Performance
With almost nobody else on screen for most of the runtime, Brad Pitt is asked to carry entire stretches of Heart of the Beast on physicality alone, cold, exhausted, and visibly breaking down as the film goes on, and he commits to it completely. It’s a performance built on endurance rather than dialogue, and it works specifically because Pitt never lets Belmont’s toughness curdle into invincibility.

The Real Star
Odin is played primarily by a German Shepherd named Uber, a former real-life search-and-rescue dog making his acting debut, with three of his own sons stepping in for specialized stunt work like wire-height and swimming shots. The seams between the dogs never show, and Uber’s screen presence, expressive, alert, and never once looking like he’s performing for a camera, genuinely does most of the emotional heavy lifting in the film’s back half.

The Supporting Cast
J.K. Simmons and Anna Lambe work almost entirely in the margins as figures from Belmont’s life outside the wilderness, and both make the most of comparatively little screen time. It’s a small ensemble by design, but a film this reliant on one man and one dog only needed its supporting cast to add texture rather than plot, and that’s exactly what they do.

Heart of the Beast World – 1.5/2

Good Points: Cinematography, Scale, Danger

Alaska, By Way of New Zealand
Director David Ayer described the film simply: “If you look at the film, it’s Brad and a dog and some mountains.” Oscar-winning Avatar cinematographer Mauro Fiore shoots the New Zealand locations standing in for Alaska with real scale and real menace, wide, unforgiving mountain ranges that make Belmont and Odin look genuinely small and expendable against the landscape. It’s the kind of production that clearly prioritized getting its two leads out into practical, freezing conditions rather than faking the hardship on a soundstage, and that commitment reads on screen.

A Small World, By Design
Because the story stays locked to Belmont and Odin’s immediate surroundings, the wider geography of the setting barely factors in beyond establishing just how remote and dangerous the area is. That’s a deliberate trade-off rather than a flaw exactly, but it does mean the film’s sense of place, however beautifully shot, stays narrower than its scenery might suggest.

Music Score and Effects – 1.5/2

Composer Jared Michael Fry, scoring his third David Ayer film after The Beekeeper and A Working Man, keeps the music mostly out of the way during the survival stretches, letting wind, silence, and Odin’s own physical reactions carry the tension instead of a swelling score. When the music does come in, usually to underline the bond between man and dog rather than to manufacture a jump scare, it’s effective without ever feeling like the film’s most memorable element.

The physical effects work, animal encounters, injuries, the freezing conditions themselves, stays grounded and mostly practical, which suits a story this intimate. It’s not a film built around spectacle, and the modest, unshowy effects work matches that intention even if it doesn’t leave much of a lasting impression on its own.

Originality – 1/2

How It Stands Apart

The central hook, that Odin is a retired combat dog rather than a stray or a family pet, gives Heart of the Beast a distinct emotional angle: this is a story about two veterans of the same job, one of them just happens to have four legs. That framing, and the decision to build an entire feature around a man and a single animal rather than a full ensemble, is a genuinely different pitch within the crowded survival genre.

Where It Loses Ground
Strip away that framing, though, and the underlying shape, plane crash, wilderness, injury, a rescue-or-die climax, is one audiences have seen many times before, from Cast Away to The Revenant to Plane. Heart of the Beast is more original in its central relationship than in its actual plot mechanics, a meaningfully different achievement than reinventing the genre outright, but not quite the full two points.

Gamersuniverse Score:

7.5 out of 10 stars⭐

Heart of the Beast is proof that a simple premise, one man, one dog, one mountain range, can still carry a full feature when the execution is this sincere. Brad Pitt gives one of his more physically committed performances in years, but it’s Uber, doing career-best work as Odin, who ends up being the film’s real reason to watch. The story sticks close to the survival genre’s well-worn formula and doesn’t ask its world to stretch much beyond Belmont and Odin’s immediate surroundings, but the bond at its center, one built on a decade-old script that reportedly moved its own director to tears, comes through exactly as intended.

If you’ve ever owned a dog, or lost one, keep the tissues close. Heart of the Beast is playing in theaters now.

Score Summary

• Story: 1.5/2
• Cast: 2/2
• World: 1.5/2
• Music Score and Effects: 1.5/2
• Originality: 1/2
  Total: 7.5/10

Have you seen Heart of the Beast yet? Team Belmont or Team Odin? Let us know in the comments.

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Pictures: Paramount Pictures