"DOGTOOTH" NOW PLAYING AT THE GRAND >>>

We run to movies in part for the illusion of safety they offer, the sweet little lies, whispered in the dark, that reinforce our values and our sense of place and well-being in the world. In this sense films function much like parents do, but to what extremes will the latter distort truth for the sake of their young?

The 2009 Greek import Dogtooth ponders this question. An Academy Award nominee last year for Best Foreign Language Film (and running at The Grand Cinema until April 7 with another nominated feature and five animated shorts), the story centers on a nameless young man and his two sisters, all lifelong prisoners in their large upper-class home. Mom and dad sustain this bizarre house arrest not with coercion, but through words, elaborate fictions they spin about the horrors waiting outside the compound's high fence. (Beware of the kittens that prey on children's flesh!)

A complex reordering of language is at work here too; in this household's lexicon, phone = salt and "keyboard" stands in for a lady's privates. As this last example demonstrates, such a repressed environment produces a warped, almost mechanized view of sexuality - its inhabitants (and the camera eye) reduce the human body to fetishism of its components: a bare shoulder, stockinged legs, breasts. Think Brendan Fraser's sunny flick Blast from the Past, just darker and sicker.

The narrative has all the classic symptoms of a European art piece, including explicit nudity, violence that shocks for its suddenness, and a maddeningly ambiguous ending. Pity, anger, revulsion, fright, and to make it bearable, uncomfortable laughter - this is what awaits you with this film.

In its quiet way, Dogtooth will chew a ragged gash through your nice little world.