Dogtooth" shows the kind of stark, nightmarish images that assail the senses during a fretful summer nap, when the body soaks the sheets and you're disoriented for a while afterward. What just happened here? It's not easy to say, except that the long procession of bizarre scenes evoke the distinct sensation of being badly pinched or stung. "Dogtooth" doesn't do anything as forthright as knock you out, but it definitely leaves a lasting mark.
When it came out overseas in 2009, "Dogtooth" got mixed reviews — as befitting its title, critics in Europe and the U.S. approached it with the guarded wariness one affords a strange and dangerous dog. Directed by Greece's Giorgos Lanthimos, it's tempting to think that the film offers a window into the psyche of that country, unfettered by the collapsed-economy subtext. But that would be wrong, and very, very rude.
Aristotle described man as a social animal, but "Dogtooth" goes the opposite route and then some, by drawing the effects of isolation. We're never told why the story's central figure, a pasty, paunchy patriarch (Christos Stergioglou), is convinced the outside world will only damage his family, but convinced he is. He has created a planet more remote and inaccessible than Mars, inhabited by himself, his wife and their three children, in a house surrounded by a high stone wall. There's a TV, used solely to air home videos that depict only themselves and no other living creature.