Early on in Down to the Dirt, belligerent rowdyman Keith (Joel Hynes, who wrote the novel upon which the film is based and is apparently playing some version of himself) and low self-esteem girl Natasha (Mylene Savoie) meet as cutely as possible in a drab one-horse maritime backwater. United in mutual loathing of their surroundings (he even writes poetry about it) they skip town and try to make a better life for themselves in the big city — represented here by Halifax.
It’s only a matter of time — and the obligatory drinking montage — before things start to go sour. Keith accidentally poisons their beloved cat: the sequence in which he tries, fails and then tries again to put the mewling thing out of its misery is positively Pythonesque — except that the unpleasantness isn’t supposed to be funny; it’s supposed to be, like, totally raw.
The same goes for the film as a whole: Down to the Dirt has been styled as an “unflinching” drama about down-and-outers struggling to maintain their dignity in a hard world. But the eagerness with which director Justin Simms flaunts the filthy particulars of their failures doesn’t suggest truth-telling courage so much as a dirt-cheap sensibility.