In Dogtooth’s opening scene, we learn two things about the confused, convoluted, and surreal microcosm of the film’s world. Three siblings are playing a series of games. Sitting in the bathroom, they press play on a tape recorder and a soothing voice recites words and wrong definitions – “highway: a gently blowing breeze.” A moment later, the eldest girl proposes a competition. The three will place their fingers under hot running water, and the person who can withstand the pain the longest wins.

These two scenarios describe the two dominating characteristics of Dogtooth’s strange setting. In a secluded villa in the Grecian countryside, a factory manager keeps his wife and three teenage children— two girls and boy — cut off from the world, both physically and psychologically. The children have been systematically mis-educated so as to control their thoughts, desires, dreams, expectations, and perceptions of reality. They live a brute, near-animalistic existence, trained like dogs, where treats and rewards are offered for the winners of childish games (who can hold their breath the longest in the pool, or who can find their mother in the garden first, while blindfolded). They are emotionally dull, desensitized to extreme pain and physical exertion, and they approach the world methodically and scientifically. These children are the products of careful psychological training and brainwashing. They seem inhuman, and the film’s tension builds on our expectations that their human nature will begin cracking through this facsimile surface.

Given the scenario, it should not be surprising that the movie resonates primarily through the disorienting experience of its uncanny style. Dogtooth’s world is clean and hyper-managed. The house is reminiscent of the contemporary home invaded by the gang in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. It is a world devoid of stimuli, where the entertainment consists of watching home videos or performing dances that feel choreographed by David Lynch, and where the kids can only dream of mundane, day-to-day things, like their mother coming into their rooms. There are occasional moments of physical abuse, but in all, the needs of the children are obsessively seen to. The father even brings home a security girl from his factory, Christina, who has sex with his son, curbing, the viewer infers, the sexual desire that might incite the boy to dream of relief in the forbidden world outside the fence.

The children’s life would almost seem idyllic — days are spent lounging in a pool, the eldest daughter is well-educated in medicine — but for the sinister overtones. Hints of the dark nature of this unexplained experiment abound. The children believe their lost brother lives in isolation on the other side of the fence, and so one of the sisters sneaks pieces of cake and throws them over the fence to the imaginary captive. Lounging in bed one night, the father and mother chat about their children as they casually watch homemade pornography. It is a brightly lit, serene, well-managed world that is so eerie, so horrific it is nearly unbearable to watch. What gets us through are the many moments of dark humor. We laugh, uncomfortably, for relief and repositioning: to remind ourselves that we exist on the other side of the fence.

Understanding how easily these innocents can be manipulated, Christina begins bartering with the eldest girl for oral sex. First she trades a simple, sparkling headband. Then the eldest daughter (the characters are not credited with proper names) pressures Christina to lend her two movies (Jaws and Rocky) in exchange for the act. When the father finds out, he goes to Christina’s tiny apartment and beats her over the head with her VCR (he is a very literal man). Returning to the compound, he determines that his son will need another partner. He lets the boy choose between his two sisters. (This is a good time to warn you that much of the film’s nauseating effects are provoked through graphic, perhaps even real, sex scenes.)

Dogtooth presents itself as a philosophical puzzle along the lines of Werner Herzog’s Jeder Für Sich, Gott Gegen Alles, the story of a boy, Kaspar Hauser, who spent his childhood locked away from humanity in a grain silo, chained up like an animal, and who must be reeducated from scratch. Like Herzog’s film, Dogtooth’s strange environment questions the nature of reality as a social construct, and pushes our imagination to accept the logic of a world that is both inhuman and humanly constructed.

The open-endedness of the father’s motives represents both Dogtooth’s strength and weakness as a film. For one, it leaves its message confused and ambiguous. It is one thing to imagine this kind of extreme psychological construct; another thing to execute it on screen with such dazzling style, and filmmaker Giorgos Lanthimos accomplishes both. But the question of “why” haunts and distracts. Left without guidance, we are forced to draw our own conclusions about the film’s confusing setup, and Dogtooth’s ambiguity allows the movie to become a multi-faceted commentary: on contemporary life, on the mechanization of man, on the saccharine lifestyle of the suburban bourgeoisie, on the innate corruption of industrialized society – meanings and associations abound.

After the eldest sister sees Jaws and Rocky, she begins to incorporate those films’ language and characters into her behavior. The movies have not only infected her world with foreign concepts, they have incited in her a revolutionary spirit. And while her mimicking of a shark’s jaws with her arms while in the pool feels like child’s play, something more profound and earth-shattering is churning in her psyche, setting in motion the gears that will lead to the film’s shocking conclusion. In this way, Dogtooth could be read as an inversion of Plato’s famous cave allegory. The projected images of movies break through the unreality of the unreliable and manipulated world of physical sense.

And yet while we infer all these allegorical explanations, what persists after the credits roll on Dogtooth is the dreamlike resonance of its surreal stylings. Dogtooth is cynical and morbid, and yet there is something undeniable about the movie’s unsettling vision. We leave the dark of the movie theater and rub our eyes, thankful that we have escaped the nightmare, but newly suspicious of the bright world that confronts us outside.