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Dogtooth
It was once rumored B.F. Skinner raised his daughter in a Skinner box. He didn’t—but if he had, the result might have looked something like what’s on screen in Dogtooth. This Greek festival favorite (which won the Un Certain Regard prize at last year’s Cannes) turns a dispassionate eye on a group of young-adult siblings who have been raised with—among other bizarre household rules—different definitions for certain words, especially words that relate to the world beyond their backyard. (They’re told motorway means very strong wind, for instance.) This is their father’s scheme to keep them docile, controlled and at home—or as he might put it, free from bad influences. But curiosity, it turns out, can’t be contained so easily.
If Dogtooth never quite succeeds in making its scenario airtight (could the children really serve as their own doctors?), it brilliantly plays it first for a kind of slow-burning horror, then for deadpan hilarity. (Dad asks if the kids want to hear their grandfather sing—and puts on a record of Sinatra.) As a metaphor, the film is open-ended, although some have read it as uniquely relevant in an age of Palinite insularity. Dogtooth never offers much in the way of motives, but it does raise intriguing questions about the blinders with which we view the world. Movies themselves are a form of behavioral conditioning—providing us with a set of stimuli and teaching us how to react—and perhaps it’s best to appreciate Dogtooth as a playful, self-reflexive exploration of that notion, culminating in the year’s most bleakly funny punch line.
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