Ben Petrie is a Canadian writer, director, and actor, featured in Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” His debut feature, The Heirloom, in which he stars opposite Glace Glowicki, opens March 21 through Factory 25. He co-wrote and stars in Glowicki’s new feature, Dead Lover, which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival and has subsequently played at the Rotterdam and SXSW, and he and Glowicki also star in Honey Bunch, opposite Kate Dickie and Jason Isaacs, which had its world premiere at the 2025 Berlinale. Visit his website for more info.
One afternoon, sitting at the desk of my third-floor walk-up apartment, I heard the sounds of panicked children trickling in through the window. I peered down to the street, where a scene immediately announced itself: a six-ish-year-old boy and his 10-ish-year-old sister, helplessly coaxing a skittish, leashless ivory hound jittering in the middle of the road. Luna! Luna! Come here, girl! It’s OK! I sprung into action. As I pounded down the stairs to the front door, images from earlier that morning pulsed uncannily through my brain …
I had been walking my girlfriend’s and my fantastically nervous rescue dog, Dilly, newly adopted from the Dominican Republic. Along with the dog, I had adopted a training philosophy that emphasized decidedly strict pack leadership. Walking down the street with a determined, Terminator stride, I blindly stepped on the lip of a discarded Jugo Juice cup lying on the sidewalk. The cup flipped in the air and bounced chaotically, triggering Dilly into such a violent panic that she pulled herself free of her harness and into the middle of the road. NOH! I declared, sending her down into her furry turtle shell. I halted an oncoming SUV, snatched up Dilly, and marched home double-time with her clenched to my chest. The whole way, I felt the haunt of a bad omen: in one week, I was scheduled to begin principal photography on my first feature film — tentatively titled Dilly — about adopting the very creature I had nearly lost to a mindless misstep. This couldn’t be a good sign.
Four hours later, I burst through the front door of my apartment building and approached Luna. This was a perfect opportunity to reverse the morning’s omen.
Luna was clearly skittish, so I gave the kids a wide berth as they tried to lure her to safety. But inwardly, I was grasping for any opportunity to rescue the moment, trying to insert myself into the conversation before becoming irrelevant. Suddenly, some vehicle cruised blithely over a fallen tree branch, firing off the opening gunshot at a dog track. Luna bolted across the wide, ruddy field adjacent to us, straight toward a busy urban thoroughfare. The kids screamed and froze, but I saw my opening.
Luna beelined across four lanes of traffic, and I Frogger’d after her. She disappeared around a few corners, and when I finally found her, I was startled to find her still. She was standing in the middle of small school field, on top of a grassy mound, looking at me. She was majestic and equine, her alabaster fur billowing in the breeze. Behind her, and on both sides, she was fenced in – the only way out of her pen was my way.
The kids hadn’t followed us. We were completely alone. Just us, and the wind.
I braced myself to project the reassuring pack-leader energy I’d been cultivating for weeks. But when I met Luna’s eyes, I was startled: staring back at me, on the body of her frame, was my own face. Her long snout had blended polymorphically with my own visage – the face I was staring at was part human, part beast, but unmistakably me. All of my insecurities, all my fears of failure, all of my weakness and brokenness, stared back at me with black eyes and considered our encounter.
I flinched, Luna ran, I jumped, and in a moment of tragic goaltending, I missed. I pulled myself up off the wet winter grass and scrambled around the corner, to see an ethereal white stallion receding toward her death. I stood and watched with doomed paralysis as she bolted across the thoroughfare. There was a scream, a bang, a whimper, and a vanishing – by the time the car that slammed into her cleared, Luna was nowhere to be seen. The kids and a collective of neighbors searched the neighborhood, but we never found her. Someone suggested she had probably found a porch to crawl under, so she could die in a safe place.
This now, surely, was an omen.
When my girlfriend Grace and I first adopted Dilly, I was convinced by my training philosophy that she was armed with a nose so sensitive to the phenomenal fluctuations of her pack leader that she could sense my true inner state with effortless animal lucidity. Her presence in my apartment thereby became a watchful eye situated in the corner of every room, X-raying my emotional state, penetrating my social veneer and detecting the true individual within. At first, I had found this dynamic thrilling: faced with an animal who could detect my inner state, I suddenly began observing it myself. But over time, I began to find what Dilly observed inside of me unsettling: every fearful, controlling, ugly thought declared itself in the spotlight of her unblinking gaze.
This revelation had become the basis for Dilly, later to be titled The Heirloom. The idea was to re-enact all of the experiences Grace and I had had adopting her, but to peel back my skin and reveal the private psychological experiences that Dilly had observed concurrently.
We began principal photography on March 8, 2021. It was a weird vibe – Grace and I had moved practically all of the furniture from our Toronto apartment into an empty apartment rented for the shoot, staging a bizarro version of our home. Over the course of four weeks, we recreated scene after scene from our life – the labyrinthine bickers we had had about whether to get a dog in the first place, to the celebratory photos we took when she finally arrived in our home. We changed the name of our fictitious dog from Dilly to Milly – altering just one consonant was emblematic of the truth vs. fiction ratio to be found in the film. It wasn’t long before we started coming home from a shoot day to Dilly, and were inadvertently calling her Milly.
There’s one scene in The Heirloom in which my character loses Milly, and searches desperately for her through the night. We shot it on the exact same street where I’d first encountered Luna. At the end of my failed search for her, I had walked home on that street, to tell Grace the story – and in my telling, I had downplayed my own role in the events. Instead, I had vented at Grace about how disappointed I was in Dilly for reacting so poorly to the minor fright of a plastic cup being stepped on. All the while, as I hammered away at my complaints, I sensed Dilly’s watchful eye silently witnessing my distortion of the events, dutifully steno-graphing every minor manipulation of the truth.
In The Heirloom’s recreation of this scene, we see both my character’s public-facing argument, and his secret psychological reality. After finally finding Milly, he arrives home and lies about ever losing her in the first place, instead opting to lambast his girlfriend for her inconsistency in exercising their training protocol. As he continues prosecuting his case, the scene intercuts between his performance – a frustrated dog owner holding his partner to account for their pet’s reactivity – and his inner reality – a scared, manipulative dude, searching desperately through the night for an animal he lost, punishing his partner for the chaos in his own mind.
I would regularly show cuts of the film to Grace, and her response was usually: “…ew.” I was often confused by this reaction. Dilly herself became distant and unknowable to me – when I looked into her eyes, I could only see my reflection staring back. The edit was a sickening extension of this dynamic; over two anxiety-ridden years, I cut the film, sifting meticulously through 150 hours of improvised reenactments exploring the cringy underbelly of my character. For two years, I stared at Dilly, and it looked back at me, unblinking, with my own grotesque face.
In December 2023, with the help of my friends, editors and emotional lifeguards Brendan Mills and Michael Harmon, I locked what had become The Heirloom. We had finally found a way through the forest of footage, and an angle on the psychological grotesquerie that felt truthful and tender. That night, I went to a Tiki bar and got exquisitely drunk; the following morning, working on the score at my composer Casey MQ’s childhood family home, I projectile vomited the entire contents of my stomach onto their interior front door, while he and his father watched in awe.
A few days later in my living room, I sat in a slant of afternoon sunlight and looked at Dilly. She slowly turned her head, and looked back at me. For the first time in a long time, I saw my simple dog: 14 pounds, tawny fur, paws crossed politely on the carpet.
She jumped up onto the couch with me. I unclipped her collar, and fell asleep.
Featured image shows Ben Petrie with Grace Glowicki and Dilly in The Heirloom.
