Dogtooth is one of those weird foreign movies which had received a lot of praise in the media and especially in the blogosphere. Almost all the critics and bloggers I admire and respect had loved the movie. So basically as you can imagine, I went in with boatloads of expectation.
Of course it had to be good! I trust my taste in blogs and critics which in turn means I share the taste in movies with my Gurus of film-buffery. And if I didn't like a movie they LOVED, that would be a contradiction of sorts, wouldn't it? Actually no, because I respect their thoughts and views to understand where they would be coming from but can still have divergent opinions. See how I slipped in a snide comment on how it's ok to have different viewpoints and yet be ok with it.
Anywho, so Dogtooth is a Greek film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and came out in 2009 amidst widespread acclaim in Greece and all of Europe in general. I guess it came out in the US somewhere in 2010 since it was nominated for a bunch of awards last year including Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film. The film is about this married couple who bring up their 3 children in a protected environment which has metamorphosed into an alternate reality. As with all great movies, the movie throws you bang in the middle of the family without any preface or backstory or any sort of explanation. Whatever you gleam about them is through the conversations they have and rest is your own guess of what might have happened. It starts of pretty innocuously like a family with regular kids but soon enough you realize something is seriously wrong. The kids are locked up in their house and are kept under a tight leash by the parents who teach them new words daily using a tape recorder. The kids are forbidden to venture out of the house by fear of dangers lurking. Things are generally dark and get increasing macabre as the movie progresses. A good example would be the games the kids play amongst each other which are disturbingly violent. At one point the father hits out at a girl, who is blindfolded and bought to the house to sexually educate and satiate the boy, for trying to morally contaminate the house. That is the one of the few direct glimpses of the parent's thought process.
The movie obviously is a wildly allegorical tale. But we are not instantly sure what the allegories are, if any. There are these themes about parents who are so fiercely protective of their kids against the 'corrupted' world, that the kids end up being bought up in an almost dystopian world. You could also extend this theme a bit into a commentary about the whole concept of home schooling. The 2 major interpretations were xenophobia and government control/manipulation of information. If we think about it, isn't xenophobia a tool used by the government to control the population. If you have seen the documentaries of North Korea, you would see a chilling real world example of a controlled society. Of course North Korea is an extreme example whereas the rest of the world revels in different levels of madness. Having said that, perhaps I'm overanalyzing here and maybe this wasn't supposed to mean anything more than being just a weird movie. But I guess I needed to do that keep distant from the actual proceedings which can revolt and repulse quite a few. A comedy, this was certainly not!