Ethan Eng spent his college fund on making his first feature film instead

Rising Stars is a monthly column by Radheyan Simonpillai profiling a new generation of Canadian screen stars making their mark in front of and behind the camera.

Therapy Dogs opens with a shot of two teens, Ethan Eng and Justin Morrice, climbing to their Mississauga school's roof, dressed in balaclavas and setting off fireworks. The balaclavas are a curious detail. No one's around. We know who the filmmakers are, and throughout the film we see them engage in much more irresponsible activity. But it's a lovely gesture from Eng and Morrice that this movie isn't just about them — it's about their whole generation. This is their version of the whole Spider-verse "anyone can wear the mask" ethos.

Eng's scrappy and caustic directorial debut is a collage of raw footage recorded from when he was 17, ostensibly for a yearbook video. The now-22-year-old filmmaker and his best friend Morrice co-wrote and star in the film, which they partly shot during their final year at Cawthra Park Secondary School.

Therapy Dogs bounces around high school hallways and suburban parking lots, collecting real teens engaged in everything from awkward young romance to moments of troubling aggression. There's also Jackass-style behaviour, as when Eng and his friends are hanging from the top of a moving car or barrelling like bowling balls into classroom chairs stacked high. This is a film about teenagers ready to enter the world with reckless abandon, and it feels moulded from that same energy.

"This whole movie was just a dare that we went all in on," says Eng on a Zoom call with CBC Arts, describing a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants production. He says the making of the film "was just as much of a stunt as the stuff we do in our movie."

Therapy Dogs — which is opening this week in theatres in the U.S., and on digital platforms in the U.S. and Canada on March 17 — sent Eng to the Slamdance Film Festival, where he became the youngest director to ever premiere a feature at the fest. It also landed him a fellowship with AGBO, the production company headed by the Russo Brothers (yes, those guys behind the biggest Avengers movies).

He's got a lot going on, including a role in his mentor Matt Johnson's new movie BlackBerry. "I'm really a glorified extra," says a very cheekily humble Eng about his actually rather significant part in the comedy about the downfall of the Waterloo smartphone disruptor. He plays a Research In Motion engineer who is along for the ride for BlackBerry's boom in the 90s to its whimper of an end. "I get yelled at by Glenn Howerton and Michael Ironside," he says. "It was fun."

Eng is speaking to me from Berlin, where Johnson's BlackBerry made its world premiere at the Berlinale the night before. He's describing the pageantry of it, hanging on details like the disco ball that hangs over a "super hyper-saturated red carpet." It's a far cry from the position he's calling me in on Zoom, hunched over his laptop in a dimly lit stairwell — the only quiet space he could find after escaping the loud talking person in his hostel and the vacuum cleaners in the hallway. 

He's in Berlin for another 10 days, the outcome of booking his trip before the festival released its schedule. I would imagine most guys his age would be thrilled at the idea of being in a foreign place with so much free time, but not Eng. "It's cold," he says, sounding very lethargic. "I'm just going to bum around."

This isn't the only time Eng, a charming and soulful young man who seems to slowly absorb every inflection in my questions, sounds like he's fighting apathy over the course of our conversation. He's given to describing his time before jumping behind the camera with that thoughtful but disaffected tone, as if I'm dragging him back to a time he's been working hard to move on from. But a light switch goes on when he talks about Therapy Dogs, which was partly made as a response to such feelings. 

According to Eng, he and Morrice were working through their own pain and sense of hopelessness when they made the film. The dangerous stunts they perform in Therapy Dogs are grand — albeit irresponsible — gestures to feel alive, a way to fight back against their disillusionment with high school and the life beyond it. They were making the movie for themselves, the audience being an afterthought, and that's what makes it feel so genuine.

Therapy Dogs is a visceral bottling up of the high school experience, made by someone who almost proudly admits how much he hated it in those classrooms and hallways. "In high school, on either end, you can't win," he says. "If your nose is to your desk all day, you're tortured. And if you're not at school at all, you're tortured. I just stopped caring."

Eng says he never worked well in classroom settings, which means he also had no intention of going to film school. He didn't feel the need — his steady diet of Japanese movies and audio commentaries, plus his aunt's U of T Cinema Studies course guides, felt like enough to him. 

"School can bottleneck excellence sometimes," says Eng. He thinks that the education system just "tries to bring everyone to the same destination." Instead, he hoped to spend whatever college money he could on his first movie. 

That attitude caught director Matt Johnson's attention. Eng met the Operation Avalanche filmmaker and his producing partner Matthew Miller at a TIFF event, long before they worked together on Johnson's BlackBerry. Johnson heard Eng's intentions to spend his college fund on a first feature and told him that it was a terrible idea. But he couldn't really convince Eng, whose grades were as low as his enthusiasm, to enroll. 

Instead, Eng and Morrice pitched the idea of doing their high school co-op placement with Johnson and Miller. The filmmaking team — who broke out at Slamdance with their own 2013 high school-set movie, The Dirties — agreed. Eng began shooting Therapy Dogs as part of that co-op placement.

"We would show them stuff that we shot and it would be mostly terrible," says Eng. "They were very honest with their feedback. It felt like every time we'd go there, we'd just get roasted. It was their way of loving you, by being honest."

"Matt Johnson and Matt Miller didn't teach us anything technical," he adds. "They made us more aware of ourselves and what we were about, who we are. I think they were very cleverly putting us on a trajectory to start to discover our own voice."

Eng spent the next couple years working on Therapy Dogs, shooting most of his scenes with Morrice after school was done, and editing the footage into a narrative about young boys bouncing off the pavement and refusing to come of age while testing the elasticity of their relationship. They finished the movie without really knowing what was going to come of it after.

"We wanted to print it on DVDs," he says, "and then chuck it in abandoned buildings so then other kids like us would find it."

Instead, the film ended up at Slamdance, won Eng that AGBO fellowship and opened the doors for him to work on his next film, which is about being in his 20s during the new roaring twenties (as in the 2020s). 

Eng assures me, though, that nothing is going to change about his reckless approach to filmmaking, adding that he's just part of a generation that can now use a camera instead of a brick or can of spray paint.

"It's still going to be a dare, but I have more chips to put all in," he says. "The next movie is my double dare."