Dogtooth

It seems like people are talking a lot about Dogtooth, and the talk is largely along the lines of, "I'm not saying you should see it, and I definitely never need to see it again, but it's a good movie." It's one of these movies that I liked,but I have not been recommending it because I don't really want people to watch it thinking, "So this is the sort of thing Lydia is into." It's kind of like when I found out a colleague had never seen Blue Velvet, and I told him to go watch it immediately, then followed up with a thousand caveats: it's weird, it's upsetting, etc. So when I say that Dogtooth is a good movie, what I mean is that it is a COMPLETELY ACCURATE PORTRAYAL OF WHAT HOMESCHOOLING IS LIKE. It could be a documentary of my childhood: incest, felicide (felinocide? catricide?), misleading vocabulary lessons. All true.

I can't help thinking about similarities between Dogtooth and my favorite new movie I saw this year: Never Let Me Go. Both are about children who are not really children, who are fenced in and deliberately misinformed about themselves and the world outside the fences. They are young people constructing their own reality, out of false and partial information. They are terrified of the outside world, and they are obsessed by ordinary shabby objects and bits of popular culture they don't really understand. Both movies use very unusual circumstances to talk about things that are more or less universal to human experience: power, trust, autonomy, mortality, family.

Of course, there are differences. Never Let Me Go made me feel like a human life is very short, unfairly short. It made me think it's very lucky to be allowed to spend any time at all in this maddening, beautiful, incomplete, imperfect world. Dogtooth made me wish I still believed in a cruel and arbitrary God, so I could stop now. That might be comforting.

The thing I liked and hated about Dogtooth, what made it hard to watch, was not really the way the children were mistreated, or the frank depiction of various unromantic (maybe that's an understatement) sexual encounters, or the moments of sudden violence. The thing that made it hard to watch was the way I as a viewer was deliberately underinformed, like the children. In one scene I found particularly troubling, the father and mother discuss a problem late at night, and the father silently and dramatically mouths his words, while we watch over the mother's shoulder. Throughout the movie, people have conversations while we are looking at odd fragments of their bodies. Watching, I felt claustrophobic and bewildered. I guess that makes it a good movie, because I'm pretty sure that's what it was trying to do. But I'm not saying you should go watch it or anything.