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Extreme Exaggeration

Watched a strange movie recently - Dogtooth. Found it bizarre, genre-defying tinged with some sarcastic homage to Greek mythology. One way to look at it would be as a story of extreme exaggeration. When a patriarch of the family is the ultimate control freak and everyone submits to him unconditionally then things go seriously wrong.  

The politically minded could very well view the father here as the head of a dysfunctional state. The wife and the mother of three grown up kids is the strangest character of all in this movie. She lives as if under a spell of her husband and acts in unison with him as if they were a two headed monster. 

The kids are remarkably docile and yet sometimes they show sparks of life in ways that range from sad to macabre. Yet, there is the thinnest veneer of normal to this family - they do have meals together and the man goes to work each day.  If the flaws in our individual characters and those of our somewhat dysfunctional families are hyperbolized to the extreme levels, even the most mundane among us could be fodder to birth a Dogtooth out of it all. As the reviewer in The Guardian concludes:

It is a film about the essential strangeness of something society insists is the benchmark of normality: the family, a walled city state with its own autocratic rule and untellable secrets.
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