What does it take to start a controversy in Cannes? Do you need to show real sex? Will a hand job do it, or does it have to be a blow job? Does the penis necessarily *have* to ejaculate blood? What about self-mutilation? If it’s not of the sexual variety, does it go far enough? How about the disemboweling of animals — is the sight of exposed guts always shocking, or only when the guts belong to a wild beast?

I saw two films in two days literally dripping with graphic sexuality, violence, and the apparent philosophy that explicit depravity is the only way for the filmmaker to get their point across — if either filmmaker even has a point beyond inviting dismay, which has been debated –– and yet only Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is attracting scandal. With its depiction of forced incest, two explicitly not-fake images of sex acts, liberation via very bloody self-harm and the on-screen disemboweling of a housecat, Greek Un Certain Regard title Dogtooth should by all rights be giving Antichrist’s raspberry to art film seriousness a run for its money –– and maybe it would be, if anyone was paying attention.

It’s not much of a surprise that Dogtooth, the only narrative I’ve seen that really feels like it represents the work an emerging new talent, is rocking a low profile: after all, it is a star-less film on a sidebar by a virtually unknown director (Giorgos Lanthimos) and thus seems to have been seen thus far by very few members of the press. It’s also done no great service by its description in the market guide, which gives no clue to the most exciting thing about the film: it’s essentially science-fiction.
A satire somewhat reminiscent of the work of Todd Solondz, Dogtooth focuses on the daily lives of three never-named 20-something siblings who not only never left home, but have actually never literally left the house. Their parents have created a complex mythology and to keep them happy prisoners and keep the family together. Mom and dad plan bizarre and borderline dangerous “games” with glittery stickers as incentives, harshly enforce a total ban on movies and TV, and use recorded tapes to teach an alternate version of the English language (when one sister wants salt at dinner, she asks her mother to pass the telephone; there is an actual telephone in the house, but it’s kept hidden in a cupboard, its function clearly coded as off-limits for the “kids”). This unusual child rearing experiment is not foolproof — it’s implied that another brother got away — but the siblings are generally complacent enough that they don’t think to fight the house rules, and without outside influence, they can’t question them.

The trouble starts, as it usually does, when sex and movies enter the picture. The father pays a young woman named Christine to come over to the fortress of paradise-like family house and fulfill the sexual needs of their strapping (and, it turns out, potentially gay) son, and the concept of physical contact-as-labor with rewards soon spreads throughout the family. Eventually, one of the siblings finds two VHS tapes of American movies in Christine’s purse and demands that the films play into the next sexual negotiation. With an assist from Steven Spielberg and Sylvester Stallone, the closed state of the home soon falls apart.

Candy-colored and deadpan-ironic in a very 90s sort of way, shot in beautiful, widescreen 35mm framing the often morally ugly action in a provocatively direct fashion while at the same time making the most of a single location, Dogtooth’s tone and style are somewhere in between curiously unfashionable and revelatory at a festival where the predominant aesthetic poles are post-Dardennes shakiness-as-interiority and high Hollywood surface-as-depth gloss. The matter-of-fact beauty of the setting makes the film’s violence, which happens suddenly and with precisely staccato sound, more disturbing than any of the other bloody visions I’ve seen at this festival — and yes, that includes Antichrist, which manages to make graphic images of genital self-mutilation seem cartoonish in comparison.

Very little period detail is given — the kids wear synthetic fabrics that could have been made in the 70s or later, the movies that cause all the trouble were made in the middle of that decade and would have been readily available on VHS by ten years later — but otherwise Dogtooth could take place at any point in the last 25 years. That said, as Russian filmmakers seem to be increasingly evoking imagery of the Cold War years to implicitly object to Putin’s rise to near-totalitarian power, Dogtooth’s vaguely retro vision, in which fear and deception are used as a shield to protect from an outside world that’s nowhere near as harmful on a day-to-day basis as misinformation has led the kids to believe, seems resonant with now. It makes sense that Greece, a country geographically wedged between an increasingly isolationist Europe and an always volatile but increasingly paranoia-inciting Middle East and Northern Africa, would have their first film in 11 years in a competitive slot in Cannes with a dark comedy in which a nuclear family is being protected as if there’s a nuclear war on outside the home, when really the biggest danger facing the parents’ vision of the world is American exceptionalism.

Dogtooth puts to narrative practice the bizarre media-as-political history disseminated in my favorite diamond in 2009’s very rough Cannes market, Disco and Atomic War. An Estonian/Finnish documentary co-production directed by Jaak Kilmi and written and narrated in Chris Marker—meets—YouTube historical diary style by Kilmi and Kiur Aarma, Disco details Estonian youth obsession with the Western culture that drifted over the border and into their living rooms via the far reaching broadcast waves of Finnish TV. When discouraging consumption of the Finnish programming (which included Western favorites like Emmanuelle and Dallas, as well as local productions that internalized the American spirit) didn’t quell the people’s appetite for it, the state went through a series of increasingly desperate attempts to protect the “parallel reality” of Brezhnev’s USSR by trying to block the signal from actually reaching Estonian TVs, and eventually creating their own programming to try to match its appeal. One such effort involved an Estonian remake of a popular Finnish disco dance demonstration show, with the sexiness of the moves and music replaced with Soviet spirit; Kilmi proves what a success that was by unearthing a spoof of it that aired on — wait for it — Finnish TV.

Spotted with minimalist but clever recreations (as a little girl reads a letter from an Estonian cousin detailing the Dallas plot about JR getting shot, big red blood-like splotches suddenly appear on the paper — from the berry jam dripping out of her after school snack), Disco is a funny, inventively made work of true-life science fiction about the futility of trying to keep brains safe from outside influence. And of course, no one’s talking about it.