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By Randy Anderson

Parents naturally want to protect their children, but there are no hard and fast rules as to how to do that. One feels you cannot do enough, and yet there is the possibility of going too far, and making their lives worse.

This is the starting point of the 2010 Cannes "Un Certain Regard" Award-winning film Dogtooth by the Greek film maker Yorgos Lanthimos: a cassette player is turned on, and simple vocabulary words are pronounced (in Greek with subtitles). The recited definitions that follow are wrong—not slightly off, but flat out, no two ways about it, wrong. The children dutifully repeat the words as do the mother and father. The camera pulls back, and we see that the "kids" are not young but in their early twenties. Get used to this; the unbalanced feeling you have at this point will continue for the next 93 minutes.

At first, I thought I was watching a Greek reversion of the 1996 flick Stupids, but that impression doesn't hold for long. The parents are selectively stupid. When the mother uses the telephone, she pulls it out of a cabinet and makes her call to the father with the door locked. When asked who she is talking to, the answer is that she is talking to herself. Her kids don't know what a phone is. Later in the film, the son stands next to a high wall and throws rocks over the fence. He doesn’t seem to be aiming them at anyone; the rocks are like messages in a bottle. The boy has no idea of what is on the other side, and he is reaching out with his rocks because he has never left the spacious property on which the house sits.

This film is a black comedy, and if your definition of that term goes back to The Loved One or Dr. Strangelove, then be prepared for some shock as the director Lanthimos puts real teeth in the narrative. Be ready for nudity, disinterested sex (the worst kind), incest and animal cruelty. The most shocking of all is the sudden and extreme violence.

Dogtooth is a surreal view of parenting gone terribly wrong. There are some extremely funny moments in the story; one of the daughters acts out a Flashdance sequence from a smuggled in video. For the most part, however, the film is a strange interior journey, similar to Eraserhead in its bizarre and quiet desperation. For a 93 minute film, I spent a good deal of time looking at my watch wondering how the film was going to wrap up as the time dribbled away. With only a few minutes of the film remaining, one of the kids takes a shot at facing the outside world, and like the rest of the film, the actions and results are completely unexpected.

Dogtooth: an unsettling experience.

DOGTOOTH on DVD

The DVD of Dogtooth is released by Kino International. Special features include anamorphic video and director's commentary.

 

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