Dogtooth

I watched the film 'Dogtooth' last night.  This Greek film came out last year, I remember the posters that looked that like beautiful art, a solitary woman faced towards the camera in a swimming pool with a blindfold on.  She is looks like she is listening for something, near her but not sure.


So I look the film up and discover it is about a set of siblings, 2 girls and a boy, all teen aged/early twenties, are being severely home schooled by their parents.  Now ordinarily that sounds.... dull.


But a new person is introduced into their lives by their father and it changes their worlds forever.
These kids are almost feral in nature.  They are socially handicapped, they have had all their words changed to mean other things.  Their parents taught them things like 'zombie' mean yellow flower, or 'telephone' means salt seller.  So child-like in nature, you feel sorry for them.


Now this is where I add a SPOILER ALERT.


The father brings a woman to the house once a week so his eldest son can have sex with her. Christine, the outsider, wants him to be more adventurous sexually, but he has not concept of how to do that.  She then goes to one of the sisters and in exchange for small things like a hair band or stickers, she gets sexual favours, the young siblings not knowing what they are doing.


This sets a spiral of events that whirls these teens out of control.  Their behaviour becomes erratic, they desperately want to leave the home.  Father has taught them that they can't leave until their 'dogtooth' falls out.  Dogtooth being one of the fang teeth we have.  The parents scrabble to create lie after lie to answer all the questions these kids ask in order to keep them in  a climate of fear and make them stay.


It ends all very horribly, with incest and deaths of kittens.  A very very dark film, but worth a watch.  Just once though, I don't think I could watch that again.