This multi-awarded film with a conclusion that is brilliantly macabre was widely praised on release and as of August 2010 – has a 94% rating, based on 35 reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. What’s certain is this spitefully witty piece of work is a genuine original – and one of the darkest, most unsettling, weirdest films of the year.
A hyper-stylized mixture of physical violence and verbal comedy, Dogtooth is a darkly funny look at three teenagers confined to their parents’s isolated country estate and kept under strict rule and regimen — an inscrutable scenario that suggests a warped experiment in social conditioning and control. Terrorized into submission by their father, the children spend their days devising their own games and learning an invented vocabulary (a salt shaker is a “telephone,” an armchair is “the sea”) — until a trusted outsider, brought in to satisfy the son’s libidinal urges, starts offering forbidden VHS tapes in return for sexual favors.
