...But what does all this strangeness mean? What points are the filmmakers trying to make? I extracted a few compelling ones, and I suspect that a different set of eyes would pull out of a few more. On one level, Dogtooth feels like a strange but pungent slap in the face to suburbia, to middle-class complacency, and to the often aggressive ways in which parents foist their own beliefs onto their children. Taken another way, the film feels like an inverted version of a typical Hollywood comedy: In most farces, we're offered a normal setting that is invaded by something strange or absurd, whereas Dogtooth goes the other way: Here we're introduced to a patently surreal situation, and it's darkly amusing to see what happens when flat normalcy infects outrageous absurdity.By this point you've correctly surmised that Dogtooth is not for all tastes, and I can confirm that suspicion by saying that the film is occasionally unpleasant, intermittently gory, and laden with sexual situations that are frank, odd, and uncomfortable. But it's this sort of unpredictable oddness that makes the film such a provocative experience. Suffice to say that we won't be seeing an American remake of this one any time soon.
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