If you’re a Michael Bay fan and love movies with a lot of boom boom explosives, or if you don’t have the attention span for foreign films and reading subtitles. This may not be your favorite movie.
But if you were raised in the Borg or have spent enough time in it, then you will surely relate to this film.
The film may be a slow 96 minutes, but I believe worth it, especially the ending…
It’s available on Netflix instant queue and I’m sure on amazon.com
Here is what the NY times had to say about the film. The seems to metaphorically parallel religious doctrines and more closely I felt, to cults like our beloved Dubs…
Plenty of parents try to instill their values in their children and shield the little ones from the perils and temptations of the outside world. The mother and father in “Dogtooth,”a Greek festival-circuit conversation piece directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, present an extreme case of this kind of protectiveness. Their idea of home schooling is to provide their children with daily tape-recorded vocabulary lessons, which would not be unusual if the definitions were less idiosyncratic ( theocratic vocabulary).The three kids — two daughters (Aggeliki Papoulia as the elder, Mary Tsoni as the younger) and a son (Hristos Passalis) — are taught that “excursion” refers to a kind of flooring material and that a “sea” is a kind of armchair.
Odd. Odder still is that the children, who have never been given names or left the grounds of the quiet, green family estate, appear to be in their late teens or early 20s. Their father (Christos Stergioglou) is a factory manager, and he and his wife (Michelle Valley) have turned their home, its swimming pool and lush lawns surrounded by high wooden fences, into a sanctuary and prison for their dreamy offspring. ( the idea of paradise on earth anyone?) Those three wander about in their underwear, speak in monotones and seem perpetually on the verge of either incest or fratricide or both.
They think Frank Sinatra’s version of “Fly Me to the Moon”is a recording of their grandfather sending out a message of paternal love(The BG/FDS)? anyone?) and that ferocious cats(Satan? demons? the 'world'?) who live beyond the gate have killed an invisiblefourthsibling. “I’m going to give birth to two children and a dog,” their mother announces one night. Then again, if her son and daughters behave themselves, they may be spared further human siblings ( Armaggedon? fear?) . The dog is nonnegotiable, though.
Are mom and dad conducting some kind of perverse behaviorist experiment? Are they determined to shelter the younger generation in a world gone mad? That protective impulse, you may or may not recall, was the motive for similar grown-up behavior in “The Village,” the preposterous M. Night Shyamalan shocker from 2004. “Dogtooth” supplies no such explanation and at times seems as much an exercise in perversity as an examination of it. Mr. Lanthimos’s ends may be obscure, but his means can be seductive. The static wide-screen compositions are beautiful and strange, with the heads and limbs of the characters frequently cropped. The light is gauzy and diffuse, helping to produce an atmosphere that is insistently and not always unpleasantly dreamlike. You might think of paintings by Balthus or maybe Alex Katz, though the implied stories in those pictures are more genuinely evocative and haunting than the actual narrative of “Dogtooth.”
Not that conventional exposition is required. And there is something both appalling and marvelous in some of the scenes that Mr. Lanthimos (who wrote the screenplay with Efthimis Filippou) chooses to dramatize. A woman named Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), the only named character and a security guard at the factory that Dad has brought home to see to his son’s sexual needs, adds a dimension of deadpan comedy to the ambience of world-weary creepiness.
As I said, a conversation piece. Though the conversation may not proceed quite into the depths of psychosexual analysis that “Dogtooth” seems to invite. Your post-viewing discourse may be more along the lines of: “What was that?” “I don’t know. Weird.” “Yeah.” [shudder]. “Weird.” I wish I could come up with something better than that, but since I can’t invent a whole new vocabulary, I’ll leave it there
If you have watched the movie, what are your thoughts.
As the article mentioned, it may bear a similarity to 'The Village' I also saw another thread on JWN where 'The Island' was previously discussed.
If there are any other movies that have touched you, or reminded you of life in the Borg… please do share as well!