Dogtooth [Blu-ray]

A Psychological Freak Show Designed To Polarize And Disturb Its Audience
Certainly one of the more surprising moments of the 2010 Academy Award nominations had to be the inclusion of the Greek oddity "Dogtooth" among the Best Foreign Film nominees. This psychological freak show seems designed to polarize audiences with its controversial presentation of an isolated family as a horror construct. The film, with relatively no political or social context, is likely to be interpreted in many ways by viewers searching for a grand significance to the proceedings. Having seen the film twice now, however, I'm not sure that I can really establish the filmmaker's true intentions with any veracity. So I won't try. Somewhere between perverse satire, bent domestic drama, and disturbing psychological horror lies the film "Dogtooth"--a challenging and unrepentantly bleak, yet undeniably gripping and fascinating, example of experimental cinema.

"Dogtooth" depicts the unorthodox life of one family. The three teenage children have been raised in a controlled...

a stunning allegory about totalitarianism and propaganda
****1/2

What if you could be the master of your own universe, able to make everything to your own specifications and liking? And what if, in that universe, you could have absolute control over your subjects, so that, not only would they have to do what you told them to, but you could even go so far as to shape the very way they look at the world?

The unnamed middle-aged protagonist (Christos Stergioglou) of "Dogtooth" has created just such a kingdom for himself and his wife (Michelle Valley), tucked away in a rural area of Greece, where the two of them have raised their children - a boy (Christos Passalis) and two girls (Aggelika Papoulia, Mary Tsoni) who are all now in their late teens - in such complete isolation that the kids have virtually no knowledge of the world that lies beyond the fenced-in little compound in which they live. They know only that it is a dangerous and scary place and that none of them will be able to venture out into it until their...

Art House Cinema Meets Hollywood Boulevard
Dogtooth

A mid level industrialist raises his family in an environment devoid of most modern conveniences but imbued with a special hatred of airliners. The telephone is carefully hidden, only his wife knows where it is, a fence erected around the house is also a boundary the children and wife have never trespassed, but most of all, in order to keep his the two daughters and son uncorrupted, (their hatred of airliners and the people who fly on them apparently doesn't count) they have been taught a sanitized language where "zombie" is "a small yellow flower" and the female reproductive region is known as "keyboard". Periodically, the industrialist pimps for the boy, and for a price, procures the services of Christina, a security guard at the plant.

Just when Director Giorgos Lanthimos seems to remove all limits to the level of parental control, Christina shows an interest not only in the boy but also the two sisters, conferring on one of them VHS tapes of Rocky,...

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