Couldn't sleep last night indeed. So I ended up watching the Greek movie Dogtooth. Twice. It was about 3:30 a.m. when the movie finished and by then I had been shaken so hard I was unable to get any sleep until the following night.
I am not an Academy Awards historian but I bet this has got to be the most disturbing movie to ever be nominated for a Best Foreign Film Award. Admirable if we consider that the gathering of old farts who pick this and that for this ceremony have us used to Driving Miss Daisy type of fare. A pervert must have squirmed his way through their puritanical ranks.
The word 'weird' does not begin to describe the extremes Dogtooth reaches. And one needs not be shown any grotesque images to realize that Dogtooth is going to be a unique and shocking cinematic experience. As the movie opens, the father is driving a woman to his house to fulfill his son's sexual desire. Once there, communication is minimal and the sex is quite explicit. Judging by the son's expressions we could deduce that pleasure is the last thing he gets from sex. But he is a boy and his father at least understands his urges. The daughters are then left to discover sex on their own and so they do, with each other.
For a good while it is hard to get a grasp of what Dogtooth is all about. The language the protagonists use is rudimentary and the acting is minimal. And when I say minimal I mean there is rarely any acting, as each sentence is delivered with the grace of a sack of flour and the phisicality the actors display is non-existent, maybe because our physical movements are to a degree learned from interaction and these greeks have been deprived of the outside world. Regardless, I guess you have got to have some acting chops if what you are going to do in front of a camera is give somebody a handjob or get your head bashed in with a VHS tape. By the way, both of those scenes are pretty cool.
Once one is in the loop and those distinctive dry notes Dogtooth strikes about every second stop distracting us from what is really happening it is obvious that director Giorgios Lanthimos has created a whole separate world, one in which the patriarch is an absolute dictator and his family has become an aberration, they have been minimized to play peons in this world of his. The world outside does not exist to them. And the promise of escape, says the father, will only come true when their canines (hence Dogtooth) appear.
Once one is in the loop and those distinctive dry notes Dogtooth strikes about every second stop distracting us from what is really happening it is obvious that director Giorgios Lanthimos has created a whole separate world, one in which the patriarch is an absolute dictator and his family has become an aberration, they have been minimized to play peons in this world of his. The world outside does not exist to them. And the promise of escape, says the father, will only come true when their canines (hence Dogtooth) appear.
Somebody called Dogtooth an 'erotic horror film'. I disagree. The sex shown here is far from erotic. But the horror is all too real.
