Though perhaps not horror per se

Dysfunctional is the new normal. There’s no such thing as a “normal” family anymore. Every family unit has its unique quirks and habits which may seem odd to an outside observer. Today’s “normal” family unit boasts more black sheep than white per generation, each generation diagnosed with ever more intricate psychological maladies, most of which can be blamed on the one that came before it. Only when someone claims to have come from a “totally normal family” should you worry about said someone’s mental health. Normal is horrifying, ripe with possibilities. Serial killers come from “normal” families. Normal people are walking time bombs, just waiting for the most normal moment in their banal existence to erupt into batshit insanity.

Case in point: the Dogtooth family is as far from normal as a family can possibly get and still exist in the same dimension as the rest of us. And no, “Dogtooth” is not the actual given surname of the family in question. No names are ever used to identify the mother and father or their three children: the eldest daughter, the son and the younger daughter. Ranging in age from seventeen to twenty one (approximately) the children are physically fit, pure as Ivory soap and blank as slates. Cut off from the rest of the world, the children have spent their entire lives within the family home and surrounding gardens, the high hedge fences which enclose the estate as effective as any high voltage razor wire barrier.

For reasons that are never revealed, Mother and Father have systematically brainwashed their children from day one, convincing them all that the airplanes that fly overhead are toys that will occasionally fall from the sky, that certain words like “sea” and “zombie” have definitions not found in any modern dictionary, and that the outside world can only be entered when one’s dogtooth (upper canines) falls out. The kids never question their parents rules or motives and, in turn, seemingly want for nothing. Even Son’s budding sexual desires are tended to with matter-of-fact efficiency. Father – who works a perfectly normal day job at a perfectly normal factory – pays a female security guard named Christina to drop by the house once a week for Son to fuck.

But with Christina comes a small window into the outside world, a window to which Eldest Daughter is drawn, at first unwittingly. Dissatisfied with Son’s robotic dry humps, Christina begins offering gifts to Eldest Daughter – a sparkly headband, hair gel, etc. – in exchange for cunningulus. Eldest Daughter is truly ignorant about sex and does not understand what she’s being asked to do, but she soon figures out that it’s worth more than a couple of $1 items in a beauty supply bargain bin. She demands that Christina hand over the VHS tapes in her bag, or else she’s going to tell Father about all the time she’s spent licking Christina’s “keyboard.” Reluctantly, Christina hands over her rented copies of Rocky and Jaws, both of which have a profound effect upon Eldest Daughter, who begins acting out scenes from both films and incorporating their dialogue into her everyday conversations. Alarmed by her behavior, Father takes drastic measures to correct the “bad influences” that Christina has inflicted upon his child, even going so far as to dismiss Christina from her sexual activities and offer Son his own sister as a substitution. But Eldest Daughter has had enough. She’s ready to lose her dogtooth and join the outside world, even if she has to force the process.

It was difficult not to draw comparisons between this film and the real life case of Josef Fritzi, the Austrian whackjob who kept his own daughter and their inbred children prisoner in a windowless basement for a quarter of a century. Granted, the Dogtooth family has a slightly more idyllic setting, but it’s like slapping Happy Face masks over the cast of a snuff film: there just ain’t no prettying up abuse.

With its stark white color scheme, antiseptic sets and lack of a streaming soundtrack, Dogtooth is like watching a documentary, or perhaps the worlds most twisted educational film: “How to Skull Fuck Your Family Into Irreversible Psychosis” for example. The reasons why this is happening are never offered. The parents are undoubtedly a team, working together to keep their children stunted and dependent through methods they know would be frowned upon by the rest of society. Is it possible that, considering their nonchalant attitude towards incest, that they themselves are brother and sister? It’s feasible, but not really important in the end. The simple fact of the matter is that they are outwardly normal (there’s that word again) and quite capable of functioning in the world they have declared off limits to their children. They could be your neighbors, your coworkers, your distant cousins. And if they were to visit your house, how sick and twisted would they find your daily routine?

Dogtooth is so deeply disturbing and horrifyingly warped that it’s ultimately very funny as well, if you like your humor blacker than the ace of spades, that is. Listening to Father announce that Mother will soon “give birth to two children and a dog” is only slightly less disconcerting than hearing Mother provide a new definition for the word “pussy” after one of the girls discovers a porno tape that Father has left lying carelessly out in the open. That no one bats an eye or cracks a grin during such moments makes it all the more amusing and far more upsetting than listening to your half senile grandaddy discussing his hemorrhoids at the annual family dinner.

Though perhaps not horror per se, Dogtooth is still undeniably horrific, a jarring tale of family dynamics gone wrong that will knock you right into WTF?! world for the entirety of its runtime. Think your family is fucked up? Sure, we all do. But if this crazy shit doesn’t put your own mediocre upbringing into perspective, then you were either raised by serial killers or you need to consider switching from Zoloft to Thorazine. Looking into the benefits of electroshock therapy might not be totally unwarranted either. Hell, maybe we should reinstate the transorbital lobotomy. It just might be the only thing that can save the Dogtooth children.