Dogtooth

Directed by: Giorgos Lanthimos
Written by: Efthymis Filippou & Giorgos Lanthimos
Full credits at IMDb

What if someone rewrote The Village so that instead of terrible, it was engaging, challenging, maybe a little mysterious? In Dogtooth (Kynodontas), three semiologically scrambled children have been raised in a fortified, isolated house where they're taught that "telephone" means salt shaker and "sea" means arm chair. They exercise, re-watch home videos of themselves, and test each other's endurance (e.g., how long can you keep your finger under boiling water?). And the boy, at least, has mechanical intercourse with an outsider, a prostitute, brought in by their mad industrialist father.

You've heard of the Choose Your Own Adventure books? This is Choose Your Own Allegory. Its ground-level widescreen rarely looks up, and often chops heads out of the frame. It's like a poker-faced aesthetic—looking straight ahead, without expression—but the abstruseness begs to be given shape.

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