Dogtooth (2009)

Bad direction meets an interesting script which by the way is an opportunistic rip off of Castle of Purity (1974), a Mexican film which i love (see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068348/). As the IMDb description states, the Mexican movie is ''The story of a disciplined and sexually driven man who keeps his family isolated in his home for years to protect them from the "evil nature" of human beings while inventing (with his wife) rat poison''.

The director just changed the scenery, added some minor details and served it to the audience. I feel pity for the poor Mexican fellow who saw both viewers and the academy rewarding this rip off.

Fmovies: Not a lot of movies shock me. So I was quite surprised the unsettling impact Dogtooth had on me. A father locks up his 3 children who are in their late teens - early twenties in a large house and they have stayed there all their lives.

The three children are told lies of various degrees. Living totally isolated from the world and in a manufactured universe, they do not react like normal people would. The lack of awareness and exposure makes for very interesting scenarios and reactions.

The film can be pondered upon on several levels. For instance, governments never really tell their people any thing close to the whole truth. Thoughts on these lines - the harms caused by leaving people in the dark are the obvious things one can take back from the movie.

I am very interested in the alternate viewpoint of the parents though. They genuinely thought exposing the children to the world would be harmful for them. While that is not some thing one can possibly agree with, there are some positives which do come out of it in my opinion. For instance, when one of the girls who has never having been exposed to popular culture, dances, she creates some thing unique. As she has not seen any thing before, she is not influences by any thing and creates her own style. That is a positive in my mind.

This is film which is close to a masterpiece. When the film had released, it was panned in The New York Times and received an average review from Roger Ebert. I am quite pleased then, that it is slowly getting appreciation and is ending up in a few best of the year lists as well. This is a must watch according to me. 8.5/10.

What if you could be the master of your own universe, able to make everything to your own specifications and liking? And what if, in that universe, you could have absolute control over your subjects, so that, not only would they have to do what you told them to, but you could even go so far as to shape the very way they look at the world?

The unnamed middle-aged protagonist (Christos Stergioglou) of "Dogtooth" has created just such a kingdom for himself and his wife (Michelle Valley), tucked away in a rural area of Greece, where the two of them have raised their children - a boy (Christos Passalis) and two girls (Aggelika Papoulia, Mary Tsoni) who are all now in their late teens - in such complete isolation that the kids have virtually no knowledge of the world that lies beyond the fenced-in little compound in which they live. They know only that it is a dangerous and scary place and that none of them will be able to venture out into it until their dogtooth falls out - which is to say never. They are so misinformed as to how the real world actually works that they think planes are just tiny objects moving through the air, and that if one of those tiny objects were to fall out of the sky and into their yard, the children would be able to pick it up and play with it like a toy. They've also been taught by their colluding parents to believe that prowling cats are a mortal menace to be destroyed on sight. The kids spend much of the day doing repetitive chores, playing meaningless games and being taught an incorrect vocabulary (they use the word "phone" when they really mean "salt," for example). The father regularly pays a young woman (Anna Kalaitzidu) he works with – the only person from the outside world the children are allowed to meet - to come and have sex with his post-pubescent son, and severely beats the kids every time they step out of line.

A stunning allegory about the evils of totalitarianism, "Dogtooth" is somewhat reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village" in its basic premise and setup, only here the guiding principle seems to be less about protecting the young ones from the harsh realities of a modern world and more about this one man's finding a way to achieve a kind of apotheosis for himself - making himself a god in the eyes of his children. For not only does he make them reliant on him for all the basic necessities of life, but he's made it so that they accept without question the "truths" of the physical and moral order he's established for them to live by.

The man and his wife have together inverted and perverted the very definition of parenthood. Rather than grooming their children for an adult life in the real world, these parents deliberately infantilize their offspring, making it virtually impossible for them to leave the home and start a life of their own. This ensures that the kids will be there to take care of them for the rest of their lives.

On a broader scale, the movie is a searing indictment of the power of propaganda, showing how easy it is to mislead people and to compel them to do what one wants simply by feeding them false information and, thus, skewing their view of realty and the truth. And isn't this how totalitarian dictatorships are born and sustained? But there's also an innate desire for liberty and independence lurking in the recesses of every human soul that must finally assert itself in a desperate run for freedom, and the movie addresses that reality as well.

Dogtooth fmovies. Boy,am I upset with the Sitges Film festival Jurors this year!!! So this film is not for everyone, but if you like realistic and paced films, are not bothered by highly explicit scenes, don't mind taboo subjects, like independent film and are into original stories.... this is the movie for you. I've read negative comments about this movie. I get it. It's not the most easy movie to watch, but I haven't been this pleasantly surprised in a long time. Saw this in Sitges with a packed audience, and I believe most of the people there were glued to the screen and didn't want to see the film end. Surreal, emotional, cruel, realistic and beautiful would be the words I would use to describe this picture. At first you don't really understand what's going on or where you're at, but soon find yourself submerged in the sad and pathetic life of a disturbed family. This is definitely one of the most important indie films of the year; aside from the original and highly meaningful story, the film if impeccably made with astounding performances. Shame on the Sitges film festival! This movie deserved the best actress and the special critics award. And I say that on behalf of most of the other people who were at the festival.

In Greece, when talking about Greek movies we like, one of the expressions we mostly use is "it was good, for a Greek movie". I am glad to say that this one was good, period. It is definitely not an easy movie to watch, as it can be really intense and deals with one or two traditionally taboo issues, but it is definitely worth giving it a chance. For me it has been a completely surreal experience, best described as stepping into a world as peaceful as heaven and as confining as hell, where things seem to work in their own whimsical way, leaving me with a constant bafflement as to what is to come next. I honestly did not realize how time went by and, when it all came to an end, I found myself asking for more. This is a movie that disturbed, moved and fascinated me while I was watching it and made me think after having watched it. It is surreal, it is symbolic (it could definitely be seen from a political point of view), it is ironic and at times it can be unexpectedly funny in a dark, twisted way. Directing it in a "dry", "strict" manner, as if just trying to capture the events that take place, was definitely a perfect choice, as was the complete absence of music. The actors did a great job at acting in the emotionally detached manner that was required plus, I have to say, it probably took lots of guts for them to do some of their most "awkward" scenes. All in all, I would say I admired the artistic integrity of the director and actors and their dedication to getting across the main idea and the atmosphere of this movie.

I don't really know how I could classify "Dogtooth". Is it a drama? (Well for a drama it is kind of under-plotted.) Is it a comedy? (It is definitely not a comedy, even when you laugh you are still disturbed by the absurdity of it all.) Is it horror? (It is not horror, it's just a horrific situation but everything, the horror, the violence etc is mostly implied.) Is it fantasy? (Well it is an alternate reality, but mind you this is a family that kind of looks "normal" on the outside!) So really, I give up. It's just a really strange, really intriguing movie, one that in my opinion is definitely worth your time.

Oh and one more thing: it is also one of these movies that it is best to know the least things possible before you see them. Quite a few things (particularly the funny ones) are based on shock value - not that the whole movie is based on shock value, of course. If you ask me, even the theatrical trailers show too much.

I must confess that I didn't understand 'Dogtooth', a film that has been billed in some quarters as a "satire"; but I fail to see what it is supposed to be satirising. A couple raise their children in isolation from society, and feed them a diet of false facts about the world; in apparent accordance with their parents' desires, the children grow up with a highly unusual set of behaviours, morals and perceptions. The false picture painted by the parents is frankly bizarre, but their offspring have no external knowledge by which to judge it. But I never got any sense of what motivates the parents to behave themselves in such a strange manner, and they seem to live a similar, fairly joyless existence to their kids. Presumably this film is meant to be about something; but to me, it just felt like a pointless oddity.