BLACK VALENTINES: The Loved Ones

In this character-driven, low-budget Australian indie movie, desperately insecure high school student Lola Stone (Robin McLeavy) plucks up the courage to ask hunky but emotionally troubled Brent (Xavier Samuel) to be her date at the prom.

Still reeling from the death of his father in a car crash six months earlier – and ridden with guilt that he was driving at the time – Brent finds solace in pot, heavy metal and self-harm. Despite his insularity and tendency to disappear into the outback, his devoted girlfriend Holly (Victoria Thaine) does her best to help him reconnect with life.

For all his inability to communicate, Brent is loyal enough to Holly to sensitively turn down Lola’s offer. Meanwhile Brent’s best mate Jamie (Richard Wilson) pines for goth bad girl Mia (Jessica McNamee), little realizing that her don’t-give-a-shit exterior masks her own unspoken heartache.

Okay, assuming you’d not heard of (or possibly seen) ‘The Loved Ones’ before, and taking into account (a) the title, (b) the above synopsis, (c) its Antipodean indie status and (d) the presence of Kasey Chambers’ lachrymose ballad “Not Pretty Enough” on the soundtrack, you’d easily be forgiven for thinking that you were in for an hour and a half of angst-addled adolescents sitting around feeling sorry for themselves, with perhaps a big emotional meltdown in the second act and a feel-bad finale just to make sure it goes over well at Sundance.

Kudos, then, to writer/director Sean Byrne that what he delivers instead is the sickest, funniest, most original horror movie not made by a European director in ages. Imagine a rom-com absurdist torture porn movie: ‘Hostel’ made by Nora Ephron, or ‘When Harry Met Sally’ directed by Eli Roth. Imagine, if you will, ‘When Lola [insert psychotic act here] Brent’. Imagine if Leatherface had a daughter who was obsessed with pink and totally divorced from reality and who decided one day that Brent would be just the strapping young lad to make her life complete … and imagine if Daddy dearest (John Brumpton) took it upon himself to make it all come true for his precious princess.

Welcome, dear readers, to the pastel coloured and extremely violent world of ‘The Loved Ones’, where the screams are agonized but the music is cutesy, where the blood runs red but the prom dress is pink.

Although Byrne might not seem to do anything particularly new on a purely narrative level – although the way he links the Brent/Lola and Jamie/Mia strands is neatly done – the advances he makes with the genre are numerous. Firstly, it doesn’t look as grubby, grainy, murky and moribund as most films of this ilk. In fact, the cinematography is pretty damn gorgeous in places. Secondly, there’s wit aplenty to alleviate the darker moments (oh, how welcome would some tombstone humour have been in the ‘Saw’ franchise or any of the Platinum Dunes remakes?) Thirdly, Byrne actually gives a shit about his characters, and presents us with teenage protagonists who are more than just grungy ciphers. Even the obligatory sex scenes are handled with aplomb, one sensitively directed, the other played for laughs but realistic in its awkwardness.

And best of all, ‘The Loved Ones’ isn’t the usual male psycho/terrorized woman routine (a la ‘Hostel 2’, ‘Captivity’, ‘P2’, ‘Eden Lake’ etc etc). Here we have the frankly wonderful McLeavy giving one of the best balls-to-the-wall performances in ages as the demented Lola. In fact, my only real complaint about the film is that the DVD cover has Samuel’s name above the title and no mention of McLeavy. Sort it, Optimum Releasing – Robin McLeavy has “next big thing” written all over her and ‘The Loved Ones’ is her show from start to finish.

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GIALLO SUNDAY: The Designated Victim

It’s a hard life for Stefano Argenti (Tomas Milian). His company’s doing well and he’s got a nice little weekend in Venice lined up with his fashion model mistress Fabienne (Katia Christine). What a shame that his brittle wife Luisa (Marisa Bartoli) won’t let him sell the shares – worth millions – that are in her name. What a shame that he won’t be able to use said moolah to run off to Venezuela with Fabienne. Poor Stefano. What’s a cold-hearted selfish bastard to do?

Well, he starts by heading off for that weekend break with Fabienne anyway, even though she seems to be enjoying it more than he is.

It’s here that they meet the enigmatic Count Matteo Tiepolo (Pierre Clementi). You can tell he’s enigmatic because he wears the kind of suits that wouldn’t look out of place on Dirk Bogarde’s von Aschenbach in ‘Death in Venice’ but twins them with long overcoats draped over his shoulders like a gangster and grey leather gloves. He also has a haircut that makes him look like a prototype for Russell Brand.

Here, though, the similarity ends since he neither launches into stand-up comedy routines or pursues pneumatic raven-haired pop singers; instead, he takes rather a shine to Stefano and they flit around each while the homo-erotic subtext heats up to a steady simmer. Then they get down to business. Umm, actually I could have phrased that better. Let me clarify: by “get down to business”, I don’t mean they leave Fabienne at the Rialto, go find a room and break out lube. By “get down to business”, I mean talk murder. Two murders, in fact. Matteo proposes that he murder Stefano’s wife and Stefano do away with Matteo’s brother.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

You have? Only with a tennis pro and the reciprocal hit being on the other guy’s dear old ma, not his brother?

You’re dead right. We’re in unofficial remake territory, and Maurizio Lucidi’s ‘The Designated Victim’ is basically Hitchcock’s ‘Strangers on a Train’ relocated to Venice. Hitch’s film was a slightly less sexually ambiguous adaptation of a novel by Patricia Highsmith, whose best known work, ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’, was set in Venice. And indeed, the mid-section of Lucidi’s film, wherein Stefano tries to extricate himself from the suspicions of the tenacious Commissario Finzi (Luigi Caselleto) following Luisa’s death (as well as ensuring that nothing leads back to Matteo, who has the goods on him), recalls the increasingly labyrinthine construction of half-truths, outright lies and tenuous evasions the titular Ripley spends half of Highsmith’s novel telling.

I’d like to think that Lucidi was deliberately playing on the audience’s familiarity with Highsmith’s works and Hitchcock’s ‘Strangers on a Train’, hitting the expected narrative beats during the set-up and Matteo’s murder of Luisa, only for things to spiral off during the second half, slowly to begin with, then faster and faster as Matteo deftly manoeuvres Stefano into an untenable position while Finzi gets closer and closer to the truth. The ending, though, is the real rug-pull and I’m saying no more about it.

‘The Designated Victim’ is a more formal giallo than most – relatively bloodless and with little sleaze. Spiral staircases, rooftop shenanigans and lurid set-design are on hand, though, to offset the absence of J&B and incompetent cops. Finzi is up there with Stanley Baker’s Inspector Corvin in Lucio Fulci’s ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ as one of the giallo’s few genuinely competent, pro-active and intelligent law enforcement types.

It boasts solid acting performances from all of the leads (even if Katia Christine isn’t given a whole lot to work with as the simpering Fabienne). Milian – no stranger to gialli with excellent turns in Fulci’s ‘Perversion Story’ and ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’ – brings solid acting credentials, as does Clementi, best known for his brooding turn as Marcel in ‘Belle de Jour’. (Outside of their genre work, Milian and Clementi have between them worked with Visconti, Bunuel, Antonioni, Pasolini, Liliana Cavani, Spielberg, Soderbergh, Dennis Hopper and Oliver Stone.)

Luis Bacalov’s score is haunting and melancholy, his recycling of motifs by classical composers seeming appropriate in the Venice setting rather than derivative. Aldo Tonti’s cinematography delivers some striking images, even if it doesn’t achieve the whacked out brilliance or spatial dislocations of the best gialli.

What lets the film down, unfortunately, is how pedestrian Lucidi’s direction is. Watching ‘The Designated Victim’ is like listening to a technically proficient pianist tackle a Beethoven sonata: they’re playing the notes and not making any mistakes, but there’s no life, no passion and magnificent sense of risk in the performance.

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SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND:Dagmar Lassander in The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion

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BLACK VALENTINES: Thirst

Let’s try a scenario on for size: boy meets girl; obstacles prevent them from being together; boy and girl get together any way; a major obstacle puts their clandestine relationship under strain; things change between them.

Old as the hills, right? Seen it all before.

Now let’s layer in a little context. For “boy meets girl” read “priest meets married woman”. For “obstacles” … well, hell, he’s a priest and she’s a married woman. For major obstacle, take your pick from: (a) the priest is also a vampire; (b) the married woman is treated as a slave by her adoptive mother, the sickly and simpleton son of whom she has been forced into marriage with; (c) the married woman would quite like the vampire priest to kill the hell out of the sickly, simpleton husband and, oh yeah, turn her into a vampire while he’s at it; (d) the priest is really having a hard time with the whole being a vampire thing, let alone getting into the husband-disposal business; or (e) all of the above.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to ‘Thirst’. It ain’t fucking ‘Twilight’.

In fact, it ain’t like any other vampire film you’re ever likely to see, and – yes – I am including the works of Jean Rollin, Jose Larrez and Harry Kumel in that rather bold statement.

The reason I feel confident in making said statement is that ‘Thirst’ is directed by Chan-wook Park, and the man doesn’t make films like anyone else, period. Chan-wook Park is a trail-blazing cinematic talent as unique, maverick, instantly identifiable and (quite possibly) as bonkers as Werner Herzog. This is the man who completely deconstructed and re-imagined the vigilante genre in his jaw-droppingly awesome trilogy ‘Sympathy for Mr Vengeance’, ‘Oldboy’ (one of the greatest head-fucks in the whole of cinema) and ‘Lady Vengeance’. This is the man who made the jaw-plummetingly one-of-a-kind ‘I’m a Cyborg … But That’s Okay’, a film that plays out like ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ meets ‘The Terminator’ on a first date where they go and see a revival of ‘Brief Encounter’. Then drop acid. While on another planet.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that Chan-wook Park does things a tad differently. And he certainly does the vampire movie very differently. I’ve already said that it ain’t ‘Twilight’. Well, it ain’t ‘Nosferatu’, ‘Dracula’, ‘The Lost Boys’, ‘Near Dark’, ‘Let the Right One In’ or ‘True Blood’, either. To start with, our vampire isn’t an aristocrat, a frat boy teenager, a hardass redneck, a creepy Swedish kid or a Suth’n gennelman with a penchant for barmaids in the kind of tee-shirt/hotpants ensemble that makes your average Hooters girl look like a nun. No, siree, our partaker of the type-O negative is one Father Sang-hyeon (Kang-Ho Song). He doesn’t get infected by a bite to the neck courtesy of another vampire, but from a blood transfusion after he falls victim to a supposedly incurable disease whilst ministering to a mission hospital dedicated to those dying from it. Once turned, he doesn’t go out into the dark and shadowy, latching himself to the first available throat and slurping it down like an alcoholic locked in a brewery overnight. Au contraire, he hangs around hospitals, siphoning off the odd half pint here and there from comatose patients. No neck/teeth interface, either; he simply lies on the floor and lets an IV tube and gravity do the work for him.


The romantic element of the film is just as offbeat. Tae-ju (Ok-bin Kim) initially comes across as a downtrodden and mistreated heroine, the kind of put-upon waif you could imagine stepping living and breathing from the pages of a Catherine Cookson novel. She then turns into a shag-happy femme fatale type. And not gradually, either. By the end of the film …

Ah, but that would be telling.

There’s so much I want to say about ‘Thirst’, from the awesome set design (particularly when … oh bollocks, that would be telling) to the stunning admixture of tension, blackly comic absurdity and curious poeticism in the scene where Sang-hyeon and Tae-ju … but that, also, would be telling.

And then there’s the denouement. Which I mustn’t tell you about, even though I want to scream a detailed description of every wonderful, inspired and straight-up demented moment of it from the highest rooftop. It’s something you just have to see for yourself. It’s pure genius and could only have come from the mind of Chan-wook Park.

Which is an apt description of his entire filmography.

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BLACK VALENTINES: Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom

Hello, boys and girls. Welcome to Uncle Agitation’s smiley happy movie club. Today we’re going to be watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom’. Hands up who wants to know what the title means.

Well, kiddies, Salò is a lakeside town in northern Italy. At the end of the Second World War, it was the last outpost of Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. ‘The 120 Days of Sodom’ is a book by a French writer called the Marquis de Sade. He principally wrote about – …

No, Little Johnny, not Marky Mark. Marquis de Sade. It’s from his name that we get the word sadism. Which is what he principally wrote about. Hands up who knows what sadism means. Well, kiddies, some people get their jollies from – …

On second thoughts, let’s send the kiddies home before Social Services turn up. All under eighteens out of the room? Good. Let’s crack a beer, order a pizza and get down to a full and frank (not to mention decidedly adult) conversation about ‘Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom’.

(Umm, actually cancel that pizza order. I don’t think any of us will have much of an appetite by the end of this article. And hold the beer as well. We’re gonna need something a lot stronger!)

De Sade’s ‘The 120 Days of Sodom’ is an unfinished work which concerns four noblemen who, tiring of life, decamp to an isolated chateau with the intention of killing themselves. The mechanics of this suicide pact, rather than involving such traditional fare as hanging, poison or cutting implement/vascular system interfaces, are a protracted and total abandonment to carnal pleasures. Yup, these boys decide to fuck themselves to death.

As if to prove that you can go further than even the Marquis de Motherfucking Sade, Pasolini updates the story to 1944 and replaces the four aristocratic degenerates with the President (Umberto Quintaville), the Duke (Paolo Bonacelli), the Bishop (Giorgio Cataldi) and the Magistrate (Aldo Valetti) – they are referred to only by their titles – therefore upping the ante on de Sade’s commentary on the corruption of the upper classes to include the corruption of the state, the church and the law. Which is basically a fuck you to just about everyone in a position of power or authority.

Prez, Duke, Bish and Mags (sorry ’bout the contractions, but I’m 400 words into this review and I’ve not even got started on a synopsis yet) are introduced announcing their intention to marry each others’ daughters and thereby “sealing our destinies forever”. At this point, should the newcomer to ‘Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom’ decide to hit the off button, eject the DVD and slowly back away, I would consider them very wise to do so. By doing so they’d avoid themes and imagery the likes of which would make the kind of stuff I sat through during the Winter of Discontent look like an episode of ‘Pingu’. (Put it this way: I’ve seen ‘Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom’ once – eight years ago – and there are aspects of it that still make me feel physically sick to think about. ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, by comparison, is something I watched three months ago and can now consider objectively without wanting to hurl.)

So, having discussed the, ah, ins and outs of the mutual daughter-marrying scenario, our boys round up a group of peasant youths as well as shanghai-ing some girls from a convent. They inform their captives that heterosexual acts are punishable by dismemberment and religious acts by death. These ground rules established, Prez, Duke, Bish and Mags humiliate and assault them in just about every manner possible, be it sexually, physically, emotionally or psychologically. They are stripped and leashed, forced to act like dogs and eat scraps from bowls.

It gets worse.

Much worse.


Whippings and sodomy ensue. As do enforced acts of urolagnia and caprophilia. The sanctity of marriage is mocked, the “bride” and “groom” (sometimes opposite sexes, sometimes not) are led through the ceremony for the amusement of their captors, only to be denied consummation thereafter (“that flower belongs to us”). Oh, and they’re generally raped at the beginning of the ceremony.

‘Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom’ is the ne plus ultra of cinematic ordeals. Make it through the two hours of Pasolini’s rub-your-nose-in-the-shit exposition of man’s inhumanity to man and it puts the bete noires of the last decade or so into perspective. ‘Funny Games’ – kid’s stuff! ‘Eden Lake’ – hah, more like ‘Carry On Camping’! ‘A Serbian Film’ – puh-leeze, there’s at least quarter of hour that’s non-offensive! ‘Irreversible’ – what, only the one rape?

By any definition, Pasolini’s swansong (he was murdered by a rent boy shortly after completing work on the film) ought to be the last word in exploitation cinema – a venal, sickening, taboo-destroying, vomit-inducing, virtually unwatchable exercise in the most bestial excesses of filth and depravity ever committed to celluloid. (To anyone arriving at these pages by searching “venal, sickening, vomit-inducing excesses of filth and depravity”, just fuck off back to the porn sites, okay?) But, like ‘A Serbian Film’, there is a political agenda behind the movie and a genuine aesthetic to its execution and as such it demands to be approached on a higher level than, for instance, ‘Ilsa, the Wicked Warden’.

In the scenes where the captives, thoroughly depersonalized, exhibit either a disturbing complaisance or turn against each other (informing on minor or entirely invented infringements in order to curry favour with their overlords) Pasolini organizes his material into a shattering indictment both of fascism and those who collaborate. Taken with those awful, gut-wrenching mockeries of the marriage ceremony (a defilement and utter rejection of love and tenderness), ‘Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom’, the film emerges as Pasolini’s condemnation – equally – of bourgeois complacency and fascist inhumanity. Even if the visual catalogue of depravities are every bit the equal of de Sade’s nihilistic source material, Pasolini’s directorial aesthetic is unambiguously one of political and social denouncement.

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BLACK VALENTINES: PERSONAL FAVES: Short Cuts

Raymond Carver had a genius for writing succinct and emotionally precise stories capturing those transient moments at which relationships are defined or destryoed. Robert Altman had a genius for multi-layered narratives and to-die-for ensemble casts. ‘Short Cuts’ is the cinematic alchemy that resulted from the transition of Carver’s prose to the big screen.

Using the framing devices of a flight of helicopters over L.A. by night at the start of the film (they’re releasing insecticide against a mayfly infestation) and a small earthquake at the end (an extra tremor sent through the protagonists’ already tumultuous lives), Altman charts the disconnections, interrelationships, joys, miseries, camaraderie, bereavements, myriad failings and small redemptions of a couple of dozen disparate characters from various walks of life and social strata.

Affluent couple Howard (Bruce Davison) and Ann Finnigan (Andie MacDowell) – he a TV anchorman, she a brittle lady of leisure – have their lives thrown into touch-and-go uncertainty when their son runs out in front of a car and is knocked down. The (blameless) driver is harassed waitress Doreen Piggott (Lily Tomlin), whose limo driver husband Earl (Tom Waits) drinks too much and gets riled when she receives attention from other men at the diner. Doreen’s daughter Honey (Lili Taylor) is married to wannabe movie FX artist Bill Bush (Robert Downey Jr), a roguish type with a wandering eye, whose best mate Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn) is an embittered pool cleaner married to phone sex worker Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and driven to distraction by the smut she disinterestedly talks to her callers.


Stopping off at the diner to shoot the shit before they take off on a fishing trip are Stuart Kane (Fred Ward), Vern Miller (Huey Lewis) and Gordon Johnson (Buck Henry). Stuart’s wife Claire (Anne Archer) works as a clown at children’s parties as well as appearing at the children’s ward of the hospital the Finnigans’ son is taken to. It’s here that Howard has an unexpected reunion from his wayward father Paul (Jack Lemmon). Meanwhile, Claire tears Stuart a new arsehole when he returns from his four day fishing trip and confesses that he and his buddies found a dead body of a woman in the water on the first day and left her there while they got on with their fishing.

Vern gets back to discover that his son has taken in a stray dog. Said pooch was abandoned by philandering motorcycle cop (and pathological liar) Gene Shepard (Tim Robbins) after an argument with his wife Sherri (Madeleine Stowe) which was exacerbated by the dog chewing on Gene’s leg. Sherri spends a lot of time either on the phone to or posing nude for her artist sister Marian (Julianne Moore), who is married to jealous and antagonistic surgeon Dr Ralph Wyman (Matthew Modine). Dr Wyman works at the hospital where the Finnigans’ son is being kept under observation; in the next room, and restored to health thanks to the doc’s ministrations, is the son of blues singer Tess Trainer (Annie Ross), who lives with her depressive cellist daughter Zoe (Lori Singer) next door to the Finnigans.

Have I missed anyone out? Oh, yes. There’s Betty (Frances McDormand), estranged wife of helicopter pilot “Stormy” Weathers (Peter Gallagher), with whom Gene is having an affair. And there’s Andy Bitkower (Lyle Lovett), the chef from whom Ann orders a birthday cake just before her son is knocked down; in the immediate aftermath, such social niceties as collecting and paying for said cake slip her mind and Andy, incensed, embarks on a campaign of nuisance phone calls.

In the meantime, Claire and Stuart are invited to a barbeque hosted by Ralph and Marian, the timing proving less than auspicious as both couples are virtually at breaking point in their relationships; nonetheless, the fragile equilibrium the end of the evening finds them at suggests that there might be some chance of conciliation. Other characters don’t fare so well.

Infidelity and incompatibility are the hallmarks of many of the relationships depicted, but Altman’s (and Carver’s) overarching theme is connection. The ways, however tenuous, in which lives overlap – sometimes shatteringly, sometimes by the most whimsical turn of circumstance. And it never feels laboured or contrived as in, say, Paul Haggis’s over-egged ‘Crash’ (for my money one of the most inexplicable Oscar faves in recent years).

Like life, Altman’s film is a thing of contradictory experiences, seemingly random and messy but inextricably interconnected. Sympathetic characters take wrong turns (no spoilers) while a self-obsessed knob-head like Gene comes through at the end and does the right thing by his family. Several characters find solace in the oblivion of alcohol. Some live in the past. Some dream of the future. Some struggle with the tribulations of the here and now. The song that Tess sings over the opening credits – “Prisoners of Life” – pretty much sums it up.

And the crazy thing is – for all that ‘Short Cuts’ trades in bleak subject matter (it contains as much cheatin’, drinkin’, death, heartache and suicide as your average C&W album) – it’s often screamingly funny. Sherri disinterestedly clipping her toe nails while she talks dirty to a caller. Gene bullishly retrieving the dog from its new “owners”. Stormy’s systematic destruction of Betty’s living room interrupted by a vacuum cleaner salesman. Doreen and Earl whooping it up as the earthquake hits, almost joyously embracing the possibility that “this is the big one”.

With more masterpieces on his CV than most, ‘Short Cuts’ might well be Altman’s warmest and wittiest statement on the human condition, no matter how terribly pragmatic that statement might be. As human beings, we royally fuck each other up … but we can’t do without each other.

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BLACK VALENTINES: Dogtooth

‘Dogtooth’ – a film whose title becomes horribly apparent as it progresses – begins with a woman teaching her three children some new words. The first indication that something is just a little bit wrong is the kids’ ages: they’re all in their mid to late teens. The second is the definitions of the words she’s teaching them. “Sea” apparently has nothing to do with the ocean; it’s a type of chair. “Telephone” is a salt shaker. And if, like me, you thought “zombie” was a shuffling undead creature, well we were both wrong. It’s a “small yellow flower”.

Later, as the kids soak up the sun outside, a plane passes overhead. Their mother throws a small toy plane from an upstairs window. The kids race to find it, there being some kind of competition attached to the retrieval of what they earnestly believe are objects that fall from the sky.

By this point, even the hardiest aficionado of such cinematic surrealists as David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky or Luis Buñuel would have to admit that there’s definitely something not quite right with this particular family.

It soon becomes apparent that they’re not allowed outside the property. A fictional prodigal sibling who suffers on the other side of the wall is presented as a cautionary tale. When it suits their control-freak entrepreneur father, he “kills off” their sibling, blaming the death on a cat. It gives him a good excuse to train them to hold the perimeter on all fours, barking like dogs.

What this blandly manipulative individual can’t control, however, is the onset of hormones, and he resorts to paying one of his female staff to take care of his son’s sexual needs. He takes all possible precautions, including driving the woman to and from the residence blindfolded. Nonetheless, she brings external influences into the family’s otherwise hermetically sealed environment. The businessman dispenses with her services and decides – SPOILER ALERT (and, uh, SOCIALLY DEVIANT BEHAVIOUR ALERT, as well) – to offer his son the choice of his two sisters.

Oh, did I mention that ‘Dogtooth’ is a comedy?

A comedy, granted, in the way that Herzog’s ‘Stroszek’ is a comedy. Or Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’. Perception, “normality” and accepted norms – not just social and/or moral, but the norms of how we expect a movie to function – are skewered to the point of absurdism. Whether one laughs, howls or runs screaming from the cinema is entirely a matter of personal response.

What makes ‘Dogtooth’ so simultaneously funny and horrifying is that writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos never gives us a why. The film is a metaphor, no doubt about it – but for what?

Again, it’s a matter of personal response. It works as an exposition on Phillip Larkin’s observation that “they fuck you up, your mum and dad”; certainly, it presents an effective warning on how parental overprotectiveness can distort and damage the worldview of their offspring. Or you could take it beyond that and consider it a response to Josef Fritzl case – the film becomes far more disturbing with this reading in mind. Or there’s the wider metaphorical implication: the film as a treatise on how governments cultivate a climate of fear and misinformation the better to control the citizenry.

‘Dogtooth’ is one of the most enigmatic things I’ve seen recently. The performances are amazing, the cinematography off-kilter, and the entire aesthetic a testament that Yorgos Lanthimos is indisputably a truly original talent.

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