Crisscrossing a suburban landscape of a bright starkness that succeeds in bringing together Francis Bacon and David Hockney (The New York Times), a seemingly disturbed hitchhiker compulsively quizzes her drivers on the most banal and personal subjects. "I'm not too lazy to eat," insists one of the hitcher's corpulent benefactors, and it's this sincerely oddball morality that graces each of Dog Days's tableaus. In the tomblike quiet of their ranch-style purgatory, a divorced husband and wife fight a wordless war while mourning an unspeakable mutual loss. A sadistic lover's ritual humiliation spawns both tenderness and revenge. Everyone in Dog Days teeters on the edge of both self-made oblivion and accidental redemption.