Kill James Bond! - [UNLOCKED] S3E27.5: Dogtooth

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

This is an unlocked bonus episode! You can find it, along with hundreds of others, on our reasonably-priced patreon!  Join us, dear listener, as we embark on what will surely not be the only Yorgos Lanthimos movie November makes us watch. A totally normal greek factory worker hides a secret: His three adult children are being raised in a one-house The Village situation. ----- HANDS OFF LEBANON Here are some fundraisers to support collective rebuilding and survival efforts on the ground in Lebanon. -Beit El-Baraka started out as a food bank, but has grown to help people afford rent, cover their essentials, and live with dignity.  https://beitelbaraka.org/donate-directly/ or donate in general https://beitelbaraka.org/donate-now/ -LiveLove was a charity for a number of other matters, but since 2024 has been solely comitted to helping people displaced by Israeli attacks. https://livelove.org/donate -Lebanese Food Bank supports displaced and impoverished people https://lebanesefoodbank.org/take-action/donate/ Solar Powered Lebanon is an initiative to restore people's power using solar panels, since larger infrastructure is at constant risk of attack. https://fundahope.com/en/campaigns/solar-powered-lebanon ----- FREE PALESTINE My friend Ahmed still needs to feed his family and afford medicine. Anything you can kick in would be hugely appreciated. https://chuffed.org/project/150817-please-help-ahmed-and-his-family-get-food-drink-and-medicine And these are some more general links you can support collective efforts with! -The Palestinian Communist Youth Union is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 ----- Consider supporting us on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------ WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com Tags

Hello, friends. It's Devon from the podcast Kill James Bond. You might recognize me from being one of the three hosts that you're used to hearing talk on the podcasts. But when I talk first, that means there's a problem. This episode was supposed to be the taking of Pelham 123 with our dear friends over at the Well, Aish Problem podcast. We had Justin, we had Liam. We even managed to get a guest appearance from November. but sadly, immediately after recording that, we learned that one of our local files had been corrupted, and there was no way to create an episode out of that. So we have, for the first time in our five-year history, a lost episode. So please, in lieu, take this absolute heater from the back catalogue. Enjoy. A large cloth used to keep.

sunlight out of a room. For example, I am going to get up and draw the podcast. Welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I'm November Kelly. I'm joined as always by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hey. Hey, how we doing? The bonus is a special episode that we released because you pay for it. We're very grateful for you doing so. Example, you are now listening to this bonus episode. I've wanted to do this for a while. We're talking about dog tooth. That's right, baby. Dogtooth is, I think, one of my favorite films.

It's once again, you're going to get hit with a film that Nova is enthusiastic about, I'm afraid. That's what I'm here for, honestly. Yeah, it was really good. I really liked it. It's one of my favorite films. It's a film about being transgender. Yes. Actually, it's a film about a bunch of things because it's a Yorgos-Lentemus film,

and Yorgas-Lenthalemus doesn't like being too definitive about his films. If you, like, read him being interviewed about any of them, he's like, I don't like to say that it's like an allegory. I don't like to say it's like about this exactly. And I think one of the things we're going to get into when we talk about dog tooth is about kind of like slightly swerving the intended meaning of something or the precise definition of something. But it is definitely about being transgender. Yes. And the reason why we're doing all these bits to start with is because dog tooth begins with a series of kind of, do you remember like if you're of an age for this, language learning tapes? Yes.

No. Of course not. Okay, so it's kind of like a podcast, but like, say you're in your like French class or whatever, you would just like listen to like a cassette type of somebody speaking in like French and they would have a bunch of like sentences designed to aid language learning that would be very, very elementary, right? And it's what like duo lingo was before it was the owl. Yes, basically.

You get like a tape and it would play and it would be like, Shut, le chat sat on the bat, but in French, obviously. Exactly. And I would like teach you the language. You should say it anymore. Yeah. And so we start with one of these tapes with new vocabulary. And we've mentioned before about for Fremdung's effect, right?

This technique of like alienating you from the thing that you're watching. You want some fucking for Fremdungs effect. We come out out of the gate with some of it because all of the words that we learn are wrong. Yep. Yes. We get definitions of sea and motorway and excursion, and they're all wrong. They're all wrong. Excursion is defined as a particularly strong material.

And the example sentence is like, the chandelier fell off the ceiling but was not damaged because it was made of excursion. Yes. Like, what the fuck is happening? My favorite, and I think the most poetic, is when they define carbine. A carbine is a beautiful white bird. And there is something slightly poetic about it. But it feels like a metaphor that's not connecting, you know?

Mm-hmm. And we have three young people in a bathroom just listening to these tapes. They don't have names as far as I know, not in the script. There's two girls and a boy. I called them son, eldest and middle. I believe that that is what the movie even calls them at some points. I was waiting to hear a name to start taking the notes of it. And I believe that they are just referred to as like, eldest.

Youngest and son. Yeah, they never referred to by name in this. They are not given names. They don't have names. Also, they may as well to start this straight away. There's like camera shit. There's directorial. There's cinema happening in this.

Because eldest is not seen in this scene. It's like P-O-V-you-R eldest. And the camera is just on youngest. As she suggests that they play a game in the bathroom, the three of them, these three siblings, of running their fingers under the hot tap for as long as they can stand it. and then taking you that.

Yes. From this, we gain two things. A, these definitions are wrong, which means that someone doesn't want these kids to know what these words actually mean. And B, fuck are they bored. Holy shit are they bored? Absolutely.

Yeah. And they're just kind of inventing games for each other. And then just to throw you off a bit more, we go to a completely different scene where a woman wearing a blindfold is being driven in a Mercedes. She's wearing a security uniform. Interesting,

that the security thing on her shoulder is in English, by the way, because it's a Greek film or the dialogues in Greek, it's why I don't have any drops for it. But she's like being driven somewhere with a blindfold on so she can't see where she's going. And the guy driving the car is like asking her about whether she likes the music, that's on the radio, which is like really obnoxious, kind of sentimental, like, Greek singer. And... Again, we get like some cinema is happening, some directors is in the scene because the camera is just one angle.

It's just on, the lady's name is Christina. It's just on the back three quarter view of her head from the back seat the entire time. We don't even see the man yet. It's all on her. And I've written something down here, which kind of tells us a little bit about the style of acting that we're seeing.

I don't know where this quote comes from, but I've always found it to be quite useful. And it's just because they call action doesn't mean you have to do anything. That's right, baby. And that is frequently what's happening in this movie is that the camera will just, sit and just look at a person and that we won't get any cuts, we will get any shots,

and the person will just do nothing. Yes. That is a lot of the acting is just that. This is a directorial and acting style with which I really vibe. I love this shit. I love this shit. As I understand it, our boy Yorgas likes to do this a lot. This is the first film of things that I've seen.

Probably won't be the last. It's mine too, yeah. But apparently he does this a lot. He likes to work with people who aren't like very trained actors. Yes. There's an interview that you linked us to them. where he talks about like he doesn't like seeing actors who've clearly developed a plan and that he likes to cast, so like one of the actors in this is just like a singer,

she's never acted before. The younger sister, married Sony, R-I-B. Yeah, and they don't like to do a lot of prep. They don't like to do a lot of rehearsals. It's just like, just get in there and vibe it. It's very like devised theatre, which is a style of working in a style of acting, which it's not one that I do a lot of. So I'm like quite intrigued by the style and by the kind of quite good results that it

gets. I think it relies on very good casting. Yes, but it's very instinctive. So we see the man who's driving her as he gets out of the Mercedes to unlock a gate over the road. It's kind of older, alarmingly bald, kind of paunchy man.

This is dad. Yes. And he drives her to this very secluded house. And the gate closes behind her, it's like, you know, high fences, high walls. It's not overlooked by anything. And do you remember the bit in audition? where the dad is kind of like setting up his son to like have sex, right?

He's like, I'm just gonna take the dog for a like 30 to 45 minute walk around the block kind of thing. We kind of carry that a step further here. Yeah, he just, he's sort of, we get the shot of him like him and Christine coming into the room with the son. The son is sat there. I would call him excited. He's sort of like, like, he's just sitting there.

waiting, basically. And then they come in. Not effusively, I would say. He's exercising as well. He's doing the like... On pins, maybe. Would be a better way of putting it than excited. Yeah.

He's clearly waiting for it to a car. This is a scheduled appointment. It's not a surprise. I love the, again, cinema shots. Is that the camera is, again, one shot, one angle, we don't move. And the camera is framed such that as Christina and dad walk into the room, their heads are cut off. And then the son stands up to greet him and his head is cut off too. Yes.

It's very impersonal. There's like not a lot of humanity here. And again, with their heads framed out, like, Dad leaves the room. The cheap joke about the kind of violence of like cinema of like photography, right? I shoot people and sometimes I cut their heads off, right? Yeah. So Dad leaves the room and Christina and the son just undress, get completely naked. She fluffs him, she gets him hard, and then they fuck.

Like, I wouldn't even use the word fuck. to me denotes a degree of passion and intensity and desire. They have sex, like... Intercourse, I think, would be the word that I would use, like... Clinically, I believe, yeah. Clinical is an excellent word for this, especially since all of the, like, siblings we've seen have mostly been wearing white so far. I was gonna get into the white, yeah.

Like, all of the buildings are as well, like the internals are all white. Yeah, yeah, it's very, very sterile, very clinical. I should also say about the sex scenes, because there are a few sex scenes in this. all of them, to the best of my knowledge, are unsimulated, which is to say that the actors are like doing this ex themselves, right? There's no prosthesis involved, there's no camera trickery. There certainly doesn't appear to be a prosthesis involved. No. Yeah, it's either an like extremely well-disguised or this is real. And it's like, I don't think you can do that. That's no. I mean, this is interesting because, because you're gonna

In his later career has been one of the kind of biggest adopters of intimacy coordinators. Like he's talked a lot about how on poor things, it was kind of like a sort of important part of the process. This being 2009, right, before intimacy coordinators were invented, it's just, I think, something that follows from this devised theater thing, right? Of being very instinctual. And that's, it's very high risk, let's say. Yes.

Yes, it is. I think in this instance it like comes off. I think it's successful. So to speak. Yeah, I mean, I can't speak for the actors, right? But like, as a kind of viewer of it, I think it works, right? Yeah, that's the sort of thing now that would be putting it mildly frowned upon. Yes.

It would be considered deeply unethical to do this to your actors, to expect an actor to do that when you're like their employer. Would be considered risky is a good word. Yes. I did go looking to see if any of the actors had said, like, said, or written anything about this. And I did find a couple of interviews with Angelica Papulia, who's the like older sister, who is very, very positive about this because of, you know, this kind of like she's a theater director and actor like by profession and by training. And so took it as this kind of like very collaborative, very like instinctual thing. This is something that I

think if we watch more early Lantheimos films, if we watch Alps, which I'd like to do at some point that you'll see more of with her specifically. So at least she was like all in on this, but difficult to say, you know. And the fact that it's discomforting now, and it's discomforting at the time, too, it's meant to be. It's one of the things this is a really alienating scene. This scene is absolutely not meant to be comforting in any way. Like this is, it definitely like goes towards the effect of the scene, which is what the fuck is happening?

Because we're two scenes into this, right? Yeah. And we've seen the father sort of like very grossly like kind of set up his son to have sex with this woman that he has brought her. Yeah, when he walks into the room of his son, he also like doesn't greet him in any way, he just stands there and waits for him to finish the activity he was doing. And then just like starts talking. Like there's no hello, there's nothing nice. The son short, like blonde hair, slightly ripped, right? And it's interesting, right?

We're already establishing this is, it's kind of the fascist like propaganda body. Right? Like, plausibly you could put him on like a kind of like SS poster, except that the fascist propaganda body is like, kind of awkward and a little bit impotent and more than anything childish, right? There's a shot as they're having intercourse of the headboard of his bed, which is covered in stickers, like, you know, like you would give to a child. Yeah, he's got this really profound like sadness and lack of comfort on his face the whole movie. Like this actor is, I don't know if maybe the actor just looks like that and that was why he was cast or he's doing something, but it works

so well. It's sullen, yeah. Yeah, he seems, I think, younger than the actor is. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, he has the kind of affect of a teenager, which is very interesting. I mean, all three of them do. Age in this movie is so interesting because these are clearly like shot as kids, but the actors

are in their like 20s, the older sisters, like, probably in her early 30s. Yeah. And it's never like addressed formally. Yeah, how old they are. It's really good script work and acting how childishly they like act and seem, you know. Mm-hmm. So having had this like very clinical, very detached sex, Christina goes to like, sit down in the other room with the older sister, and they talk. And it's like a language language language type.

It's like duolingo again. They talk about food and it's very like kind of form sentences. One of them says, the older sister says, burgers is one of my favorite meals, right? Which is, you wouldn't really say this. It's stilted. It's unnatural, right? Burgers is one of my favorite meals.

Yeah, to be fair. It's up there. Burgers is good as hell, but if you're saying burgers is one of my favorite meals and the response is like, I like fish soup and cakes, then you think, oh, this is, you know, this use of language here is slightly strange, you know? Yeah, it's a little bit like, do you get to the Cloud District very often? Like, it's just a bit, you know what I mean? Yeah. And we see Christina like sits with both sisters who are sitting there very, very

creepily. Every time they're together, it's kind of like a visual read of like the twins from the Shining. They're looking real creepy. And the dad like takes a home video on a camcorder of all three of the kids and her actually stops to tell her to smile more and she puts on sort of like, full smile. And it's like, This is uncomfortable. Yeah. This is weird. And after this, Christina is paid, blindfolded again, and then driven home.

Mm-hmm. Purely transactional. We then go back to the kids who are like learning some more from their tapes. They have a maths lesson in which every angle in a triangle is like impossibly wrong. Yeah. Yeah. All of the maths is wrong as well, so we're not just, we're not just deforming language here, we're also like the numbers as well.

This is intercutter with, we see the younger sister is torturing a Barbie. Yes, she is, yeah. There's a scene quite like this in Gretchen Felcom Martin's novel, Cuckoo, which made me for a while think that these kids were in a conversion therapy camp, because in that novel, a bunch of kids get sent to a conversion therapy camp, and they are also set, like, maths problems that are impossible. They're taught, like, English and biology lessons that are, like, wrong, not just in the sense that was like, oh, biology, like, just one male and female, right?

It's like crazy, like crazy wrong. So yeah, it's very interesting. It's like a deliberate weakening of the brain by just pouring nonsense into it. Yeah, I wouldn't say that this is very far detached from a conversion therapy camp at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really a good read. If two trains leave Hamburg, one's going 50 miles an hour and the other's like seven dogs in a trench coat, how much is the budget of Tomb Raider 3? It's like, so what?

Like, calculate the angle of the budget. What? Like, it hurts your brain to try and think. Big a trench line from a fence until dark. Yeah. And it's interesting too, because it gets you thinking. It's intentionally destabilizing. It gets you thinking about like, what world is this?

Like, what's the fucking conceit here? And I think one of the recurring things is that Alontheon and the script writer for those whose name I'm shamefully don't remember, but who also did Alps, like doing, is not telling you stuff, keeping you as in the dark as possible, which fits very much with this movie, too. We also see that the family has dinner. Mum is also here. And one of the kids, I think it's the youngest, says, Oh, Mom, can you pass me the phone?

And she passes her the salt. Yes. So, like, their words have all been, like, fucked up. My notes say, what kind of Professor X school slash conversion therapy camp is this fucking guy operating? It's beautiful, too, when she does that, because it's a little way into the conversation. And it means that they've given, like, the father a kind of a shopping stride of stuff that they need. And, like, antihistamines, bandages, tint.

for your eyebrows. And it's, now that she's used a word that is wrong, you go back and think, well, what the fuck was any of the rest of that? Yeah, yeah. You introduced, like, total confusion to the thing, because nothing is necessarily what it's supposed to be. You get a real sense of what exactly they're being deprived of with which words are being used wrongly.

Like, telephone is a really key one. Mm-hmm. Like, these children are in a village situation where it's just one house. Yes. Yes. Oh, I really like this. I really like experimenting with the ways in which, like, parents build the reality of their children.

And I want to talk about that extended later on. Yes. I need a few more pieces to put together yet. It's also very much a film about child abuse, right? Like, big trigger warning for that on the front of this, because, like, again, if you're denying your child, the kind of ability to even know the word telephone, right? if you're hindering their ability to communicate,

then even aside from keeping them close to that, that is a bad fucking sign. Yeah, I mean, the term it brought to mind for me is a philosophy term, hermeneutical injustice, which is when you deprive somebody of the concepts that they need to take control of their own life. So, for example, Section 28 would be a classic example of hermeneutical injustice, like an entire generation

of British kids were simply not given the concept of queerness. And therefore, their development, the ones who work where was stunted, you know? And that's partly why I didn't come out for such a long time is I didn't know what a trans person was until I was 19 because it was illegal to tell us, right? So, yeah, like, that is what the film is showing us. Is this, these kids are being denied the knowledge

that they need to control their own lives. It's a film about being transgender amongst other things. So we see that the kids are engaged. We see what the stickers are about, right? Because the stickers are a reward for good behavior. And as a reward, the one who gets the most stickers is allowed to choose what they do that evening for entertainment. And the son, in what is kind of lightly implied to be a kind of rigged in his favorite contest, wins, and gets to choose the entertainment, for which he chooses watching a home video. And it's another video of them.

And we see as they're watching it that the younger sister is like mouthing along, because they've seen it so many times. she knows the words. And it's like, this is the kind of like, this is what they're watching, right? Yeah, it's very odd. Yeah, we're kind of like sabotaging the existence of like the, it's an ordinary living room, it's got like a TV in it, and it's like, well, what's this for? But it's for watching like home videos that your dad has taken that are quite creepy, you know, rather than anything else.

It has another use later. And the son washes the family car, and then he goes and he talks to, you know, the hedge. The whole compound is surrounded with this very tall hedge and fence. He talks the hedge and he says to it that he's proud of doing his chores well and he says, I wish you could have seen it.

And then he starts picking up rocks and throwing them over the hedge. And his parents see him doing this and bring him in and like say, what the fuck is all this about then? And he says my brother threw the rocks at me first. And then

mum immediately says, that's not true. And we get this interesting moment where the son, without being told he has to, drinks mouthwash and holds it in his mouth. Oh, this fucking scene. Until it burns. Yeah. This fucking scene.

The thing is, the opening shot of that scene is the bottle of Listerine mouthwash up close, but it has no label on it. Like you recognize it from the shape of the bottle, right? It's quite a common object that has been kind of like, it's been ad busted, right? There's no branding on it whatsoever. This, but the dad is like a kind of left. left-wing bigger, you know, he's like, I'm ad-busting my kids. Yeah.

Like, listen, I'm gonna raise my kids without brands. Yeah. As we see later on, in a cutaway bit, like, he is in fact removing the labels from all the bottles of everything he brings up. Yeah, that's a perfect little, like, the way that's structured in the film as well, that we see this first, and we're like, what the fuck that's a list room? And then later on, we see him like, stop the car on the way home and painstakingly cut the labels off of everything.

But it's interesting that he does this, as soon as mom says, that's not true. He does this without being told. It's implied that like, this is such a commonplace punishment to just hold mouthwash in your mouth until it burns until mom is just like, no, now you can spit it out. It's so like, yeah. And it's sadistic, but it's also clinical, the kind of like antiseptic nature of Listerine as well. Like it's like a thing about like hygiene.

Yeah. I make the joke about the left wing thing. This is I think more and more explicitly a kind of fascist aligned thing, right? And not for nothing that I note that Greece was a military dictatorship for a number of decades, right? Yeah. But there's an interesting practical real-world problem, which I'm glad that the movie thinks of and thinks to incorporate here. Which is that the next day, as Dad is going to work and all the children and Mama gathered to say goodbye, a plane flies over the house. Yes.

Which is obviously not something that Mom and Dad can prevent. And so the children like bicker about how if the plane falls, and we don't really know what this means yet, which one of them is going to get it. And violence intercedes. I genuinely think Yoga San Theon's as one of the only directors who has ever filmed violence, right? Because the kind of instinctive, like explosive nature of it, right? He's him and Michael Hanuker, right? Because the oldest daughter says, like, oh, if it falls, I'll get it. and the mum just like full force, like slaps her across the face.

And the way this is filmed, this is like the way that violence is in these films, like it feels like being slapped across the face feels to watch. It's like really like a fronting. Yeah, it's interesting as well that we don't like cut into a shot of the violence and then cut back out again. It's all in the same shot. And so it's just like, did that just happen? It has that quality of like, what the fuck was that?

Like... The kind of absurdity of violence. They're like, yeah. Zero to 100 to zero. And mom says, whoever deserves it will get it. It's like, what the fuck is that? What are they doing? This is an entirely like habituated form of violence, right?

Like it hasn't lost any of its power or it's kind of like spontaneity for that, but this is clearly a kind of like living situation in which violence is absolutely common, right? So dad goes to work at the factory where they make room tone? Yeah. Yeah. This is a really good choice. I love this because what the dad does, the dad has to leave because he's like in charge of all of this. He's got to get the money somehow.

This is his little hermetically sealed world. And where he goes, when he goes to work, is dismal. It's fucking disgraceful. He's at this little factory and every shot of the outside of it, like every establishing shot is so miserable. Evenly like the same like clinical. Like it's all white. It's not dirty so much. It's like monolithic.

Have you ever looked to the factory and just like really try to take in the scale of it? It's shots like that. It's not entirely clear like what it is that they do here other than like make you listen to a lot of room tone. But he passes Christina on his way in like waves and says hello. We established that dad's boss doesn't know this because they have this conversation about like, oh, really sorry. Like yeah, you got to come over for a beer sometime.

Like oh, your wife, she uses a wheelchair. She can't leave the house, which we know is a lie, right? So they have this excuse. But this is also brilliant world building, right? And it's a little bit of extra reassurance along with the planes that like, yeah, the outside world, normal, right? Completely normal.

This isn't a situation where like everybody's doing this, right? This is one guy and his secret Yosef Fritzlas family. Yeah. Who meanwhile, eldest and youngest are playing a game of, Let's chloroform ourselves and whoever wakes up first is the winner? These are the most bored children in the entire world. Recreational anesthesia for fun and profit. I mean, I do want to say also, like, when we see the dad at work, right?

That's the only time we ever see him contradicted, right? Because he's his boss, right? They're like, they talk about which kind of tiles they like or whatever. And the guy full force, like, disagrees with him and says, Oh, no, I like these ones. You know, he has to like change his view. Whereas back in the house, obviously he never has to do this. I think that's worth noting.

Yeah. It's not the only time he's defied, actually. That's true. That is true. Because we get this really nice scene where we sort of expose him as being a little bit pathetic, that he goes to a dog obedience school. Yes. Where he's apparently checked in his dog.

This obedience school trains dogs to be guard dogs, we're shown. showing this quite vicious Doberman being trained to attack on command. And he says, I want my dog back, please. I need it back. And the guy training the dogs is like, I'm gonna tell you the themes of this movie. I love these scenes. I love the scene where they're like, here's the movie in the mouth of just a different guy. He says, like, I can't give you a dog back because your dog's on like a training program. And dogs are like clay. Every dog is wasting for us to show it how it should behave. And do we Do we want an animal, or do we want a friend?

And then we go and see the dog, Rex, which is a nice kind of like, you know, Labrador-looking thing, and which doesn't come when he's called. And all the dad can do is to like yell his name more and more. Yeah, keep going over and over. Like 20 times, and he doesn't listen. The dog isn't moving a little. He looks like a fucking idiot. Just standing there, you're like, Rex, Rex!

He's like, he's like fucking Alan Partridge in the car park and like... Fenton! Jesus Christ! Dad is exposed as this, well, like, he's been built up as a this kind of tyrant, and then we see, like, this guy's a fucking loser. Yeah, yeah. There is also, aside from the obvious parallels here, of like, are you raising your children to be your friends, or are you raising them like dogs, the kind of radical animal rights reading of this that's possible that's like, hey, maybe this isn't such a good thing to do

to a dog either, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it isn't. Also, as far as the, like, recreational chloroforming goes, the thing that leads into that, is one of the sisters, the oldest, saying that she has like a stomachache. And the younger, who has her own medical room, sort of like saying, you know, well, that's not where your appendix is, your appendix is down here and giving her some, like, medical

advice before, like, chlorifying themselves. And all of the medicine is correct. Yes. Yes, great catch. The younger sister, when she was at the dinner, type earlier, was asking for, like, antihistamines and bandages, and presumably those are also correct. because this is functional language. Like, this is useful knowledge, right?

This isn't something you want to fuck with. And so the idea that you have a kid who doesn't know what... Like, what angles in a fucking triangle add up to, but knows, like, how to utilize antihistamines. Yeah, or like where the vermiform appendix is. It's really like... Yeah, you think cervical would be far down because it sounds like cervix, but it's actually way up here. Yeah. Yeah.

But... So the dad comes home. home, having not retrieved the dog. This is where we see him cut the labels off the shopping. Which I really like, because it's sort of, like, he's leading the kids to believe that he's like gathering these raw materials from the world. Like he's not at work at all, he's out there, like, getting these things. Yeah.

The most perverse sex scene in the whole movie. This is fucked up, yeah. I feel like I would understand it more if I knew what the music was. Well, I think the music is the same kind of like crooning, like, Greek bullshit that he was listening to in the car, right? with Christina, he comes home, he and his wife have sex, and they really do have sex. Like, it is intimate, sort of, but in the sense that they're both listening to a Walkman with separate headphones on.

Yeah. And this is fucking, this is fucking sick. Sickening. They're both listening to like, Ode to Joy or some shit. They're fascists, they're lost in the past, they're trying to, like, get a hold of this. It's more than that, too. It's also that, like, we're trying to keep any, like, outside of, culture, including music, from our children, because they might overhear it.

You're so right, yeah. Otherwise, they just play it on the... We see that he has, like, a vinyl, like, record player, and that he's not using this in this moment is interesting, yeah. I hadn't pulled that out. Your kids might overhear, like, language, like, actual, like, Greek language, you know? Yeah. Fascinate.

So they're, like, you know, isolating them from that, and they're kind of like, it's... And it's solipsistic too, right? Like you build this kind of cultural world for yourself and your wife, right? And you exclude your children from it. And it's a good metaphor for that kind of process of cultural reservation. I get to listen to this because I can be trusted ideologically, but you know, it might be a bad influence on you. So Christina comes for another visit.

Well, Christina comes, but she doesn't. So she's got some notes for the boy about it. Yeah. As I understood my reading of the scene, the son doesn't want to finger her or read her out. Yes. He just wants to fuck Doggy Star. Yes. And it's not like particularly, it's selfish but in a childish way, right?

Where he's like, I don't like this as much. I like the thing we were doing before. I like the bit that makes me feel good. Like he just doesn't like conceptualize this as something you would do for someone else. Yeah. Yeah. So Christina after having sex with him, she's clearly like working on this in her mind, right? She's had this idea, this is something that, this is a situation.

I can like turn to my advantage that I can exploit here. Yeah. And so afterwards, she, she like goes to sit down with the older sister. The eldest has admired her headband. Yes. It's got little like sparkly crystals on it, you know? Yeah. And Christina says, well, I'll give it to if you want, but what can you give me an exchange?

When we get this, this is quite creepy scene where she tries to trade her something from the headband, she's like, oh, I'll give you this pencil, it has an eraser on the end of it. Yeah, we see all the things that she's... she thinks are like good and valuable in her. All right, this tape measures. Yeah. What the fuck? No, Yorgas likes making movies about getting your pussy eaten.

This is a preoccupation for him. Take the fucking estrogen already, man. Yeah, and... Hopefully Hunter's influence can rub off on it. The way this is filmed is it's sort of like halfway between child abuse and, like, putting peanut butter on your junk and like calling a family dog over, right? Like... Abso fucking LULU.

animal abuse. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Like, this is a kind of, like, this is not someone who even, like, speaks the language to know that they're, like, they can't consent, right? Like, they can't consent, because they don't have, they have no conception of what's fucking going on. Yeah, literally actually, literally don't speak the language.

Because as we established, like, later on, Christina at some point mentions the word pussy to someone, and they ask mom, like, what's pussy? And then she said, oh, it's a big light. And we see later on, somebody uses the word keyboard to refer to pussy. Yeah. This is one of the best punchlines in the movie is like, later on, she turns the tables on Christina, and she's like, well, how do you think my parents would like it if they found out that I was licking your keyboard? This is also why my letterbox review of this is my favorite joke I've ever written.

I said, I love an allegory for how fascism mutilates our linguistic forms almost as much as I love eating keyboard. But yeah, also, to be clear, these are two like adult women, right? Yeah, like they're both in their like 20s, right? Like, they're about the same age. The oldest daughter is, I think, older than Christina. And then, like, it raises the question of, like, how the fuck do you groom a woman in her early 30s? Ask... And...

Ooh! Pretty good! Thank you. But yeah, so... But this works for Christina in the moment, right? Like, she gets eaten out by the older sister. Meanwhile, the mum is like on the phone to the dad at work. And she's had to like...

A hidden phone. Yeah, she's had to like lock herself in the bedroom and retrieve like a hidden phone to call him. There's something very fun later on where we're like, we hear two of the two daughters talking with each other and one and it's like, mom's not going to be here for a while. She's in her room talking herself again. So like this is something she does often. Yeah. They don't know what a phone is. They don't know what it could be. Yeah, telephone's the fucking salt. Like how are they going to even know to say this?

But we see that in having done this, right, Christina has fundamentally destabilized the house, right? Because now- Yeah, she's introduced a hierarchy that you lick things you like, and unfortunately that remains for the entire rest of the fucking movie. This kind of like, warped sort of childish understanding of sex enters this kind of like very hygienic, very like clinical environment. Yeah. Yoros likes two things, right? He likes making movies about eating pussy, and he likes making movies about

incest. And this is the incest bit, the first incest bit, I should say. Yeah. Because the older sister and the younger sister are just like lying on like a bed together. Interesting, by the way, is great storytelling that the older sister has like a really deep, like, big scar on her shoulder that's never explained. Yeah. So, Eldest offers to trade the headband to youngest. If she licks her, And then it's like, she's like, where do you want me to lick you? And there's this like long pause as we go, oh God, no, your ghost, please don't. And then she goes shoulder. Yeah, because she doesn't know.

It's a perfect like joke structure too. You set up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But now it's time to, now it's time to like do some stuff with Sun. So Sun is playing with a toy airplane in the garden. And one of his sisters out of jealousy snatches it from him and throws it out of the compound. Oh, I love this. like four feet outside the gate.

And then just to kind of do the sort of violence is commonplace, she then slashes her brother's arm with a kitchen knife and runs away. Yeah, this is the younger sister who does this. It's actually unrelated. The older sister takes the plane. And then, for like, seemingly no reason, the younger sister is the one who like, cut him. Yeah, I didn't notice because all of the shots are filmed just the back of the lady's knees. So I didn't catch it. It was different women. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Explosive violence again. We see him get like bandaged.

Incidentally, there's a similar like arm bandage on the younger sister after this. We never see how she got it or what it's for, which I really like is like, it's good. There's been some kind of like punishment here, right? And you also think about the scar on the older sister. And like, how many times has this happened? Like how much violence are these kids like doling out to each other? So son tells Dad about the plane. And it's like four feet outside the gate.

And dad gets in the car. drives the four feet. The sun is like on the, it's like standing at the gate. He could like easily just walk out and get it. But what this teaches us is that like these kids can't go even an inch outside the compound. They're not allowed.

Dad gets in the car, drives four feet out, picks up the toy plane, reverses back and gives it to him. Really love that he doesn't even like break the fiction by going out to get it himself. Like he maintains it. He gets in the car. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. They think that you need to be in the car to leave, which will be important. There's a bit where the, the son has a nightmare and you get, again, the very comic thing of the large adult son

getting into bed with his parents because he had a scary dream. Then we get some fantastic fucking acting because the son is in the garden doing chores and he sees a cat and without saying anything, it is very clear from the way this actor reacts that he has no idea what this animal is,

has never seen it before and it's terrified. Yeah, no, he's so good. It's such good acting. Is this like harmless little black and white stray cats? And he's just like, oh, fuck, what the fuck is that? Like, oh. And then it cuts across and like both the girls are like hugging each other in the in the window of like the front room, go like, oh, oh.

He reacts like he's seen the fucking zinawulf. And he, he like stalks up to it very, very slowly. And I'm sorry to say, listeners, kills it with a pair of garden shards. Oh, he does so. Yeah. I really hope this was simulated. Off screen, to be clear. Oh, yeah, I don't think they actually killed a cat for this, but like...

I also want to know how they got the cat to make those noises then. Don't I? Yorgos, I don't trust you because you made me see a man's penis, the real one. It was real, yeah. Again, it's very Michael Hanukkah, it's like funny games, also parasite a bit. Like, this kind of like very, like, well-kept house into which, you know, like, spatters of blood across the lawn. The dad gets, like, called at work about this, and he's like, perfect. This is a great opportunity.

Yeah, I will use this to reinforce my control. Yeah, how does fascism work? How did the war on terror work? How did any of this shit work? Like, he comes back, having stopped on the way home, to, like, pour fake blood all over himself, like, scratch his own clothes, yeah. And he comes back and he's like, we're fucking under attack. He comes, yeah, he rits himself of this turbulent, like, fake outside, son.

He's like, your brother from the outside is dead. he was torn apart by a cat. A cat is the most dangerous thing in the entire world. Yeah. It's like, I found his body, he's dead. Stop throwing rocks over the fence, stop thinking about him. Stop, also throwing slices of cake over the fence for your brother, which I saw you do earlier on.

But yeah, cats are the most fucking dangerous animals that exist. They eat children. This is why we must hide in the house and pretend to be dogs. Yeah, this is a, it's a ridiculous, like, obviously fake threat from a, like, patriarchal figure, right? But in order to scare off dogs, he like gets them on all fours barking, all of them, including his wife. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they're like barking, like, really like, kind of like, aggressively, you know? This is, you know, the sort of puppy girl, wholesome shit, this is not, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's militaristic. Like, he's kind of like a drill instructor here, you know? Do you want an animal or a friend? I'll ask you over and over. I think it borrows a couple of shots from four metal jacket, in fact.

And just to seal the deal of no more talking about the son who's gone, who also at this point I'm like, was he ever real? Was there a fourth child who escaped and that's what this is? Or is this just like some made-up shit? I don't know. It's possible. Is the fourth child purely rhetorical as a device for control? Anyway, they hold a funeral by the hedge for the departed bro.

God, it's so good. They're just all up against the hedge dressed in their like Sunday burst. Yeah. Throwing flowers over the hedge. Throwing flowers. One of the sisters, I think, says, I'm sorry that you felt that you had to leave and you've made a terrible mistake

and it was very wrong with you, but I still miss you because you're my brother, and I love you. And so it's like, they hold a funeral for the brother the way you'd hold a funeral for like, you know, a family member who'd committed fucking murder. Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's a lot of conflicted feelings

of being like, oh, you did a horrible thing leaving, but like, you're still family. Yeah. What the fuck is this? Sorry, that's about it. It's still the experience of watching this film is like, suddenly, pornography. Oh yeah, you've seen Cox before, guess what? Here's one again.

It's... Yeah. The other use of the TV, right? In private is we... Watching porn. We see that the, like, the mom and the dad are like watching porn, presumably, like, during sex. And so you get like, half screens worth of this, like, porn video. Okay, this is kind of perverse, right? Like, not just in the obvious way, but also, like, again, we've introduced

this TV that you use for home movies and porn and sort of like nothing else. Slightly hypocritical of the film to tell me that like, oh, watching images of people, fuck, that's bad and creepy and weird. I'm like, you always made me do that. I don't think it's anti-porn, right? I think it kind of views it as like empty calories. And I think it also is like, part of the objection here is that it's something that like, you can't watch anything on this.

It's something for us to do as like an instrument. social control and then we can use it recreationally, but only in secret, you know? Okay, yeah. And so the mum is pregnant. And so... What is she? That's what she says. She says she is.

She does say it, yeah. This scene is, she says it to Dad in private, but the way this has acted, it's like, are you talking within the fictional quantifier of like, this is what the deal is? It sort of seems like they're negotiating it a little, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because she says I'm pregnant. It's twins, a girl and a boy, and he goes,

and a boy, and he goes, what if it's triplets? And she goes, that's excessive. So it's like, are you inventing the narrative together, or are you seriously pregnant? Like... Impossible to say. Yeah. No way to know. But so he announces to the kids, in a few months, your mother will give birth

to two children and a dog, right? Like, this is, again, we're sort of like, we're fucking up some basic biology here, you know? Like, and we're introducing this profound strangeness. It's like, yeah, your mom can do this. And because the kids are like, annoyed about this because they're going to have to share their rooms. She's like, if your behavior improves, I might not get pregnant or I might not give birth.

Yeah. Wild. It's so fucking weird. It's so weird. At this point, we find out what the planes are all about because another plane flies over the house and let mum and dad with a wink and an odd signal. Mum, unseen, throws a toy plane into the garden. And then dad goes, oh, a plane's gone overhead.

It just fell in the garden. And they all race to go and get it. And it's like, oh my fucking God. It's all part of the narrative. They've got of everything. I really, really like the way that like, even the things that would traditionally break the narrative have been like used to reinforce it.

Like, it's very well thought out on the part of the dad here. And the mum, I guess the mum is probably involved. So at this point, we have to have some more incest sex. Oh, yeah. All right. Well, it's not even sex. They don't know enough. They don't know the pussy.

They don't know about the pussy. It's a keyboard. It's like intimate though, in the sense that it's like the Hillimody tweet, you know, T for T isn't, it's like two sisters locked in an attic for like decades together. These are the two sisters being locked in an attic together, right? Yeah. In that it starts out in the kind of like transactional way of like, I'll give you a headband if you lick my shoulder or whatever, except this time the older sister doesn't have

anything to give and the younger sister is like, that's fine, it doesn't matter, right? And she like licks her inner thigh in something that's like, approximately sexual. Yes. And it's like, this is, this is like very weird and very discomforting, but it's also a moment of like genuine human connection between them in the form of incest sex. Yes, yes.

This is like, that's kind of, again, so like... With the tools they've been given to understand the world, this is an intimate thing between sisters for them to do. But... To Lendemos, this is an interesting deformation of the need for human connection. right? Something he'll come back to a lot is, yeah, why not try and fuck your sister? Why not try and fuck your dad? This is because you're looking for something and you don't have those like boundaries, right?

Been spending too much time on 4chan again, I remember. Yeah, fucking TTT-TTS film maker. Take the estrogen. Greek repressor here. It wasn't that good. It wasn't good enough me to try again. Dad engages in some more pathetic theatre where he puts fish in the pool and then like waits for the daughter to discover them and then hunts the fish in the pool with a spear gun.

So almost literally shooting fish in a barrel. It's like, what the fuck? That's ridiculous. We've manufactured these like enemies and stuff. Also, Anton Chekhov gonna be very angry about the spear gun because you think, oh, spear gun, oh, oh, dad's gonna get caught with that spear gun at the end. No, that would be far too big an event.

Yeah. And we see that they have a little litany at dinner, right? They do. Which is very weird and misogynistic, I should also say, where it's like the, you know, a man's most productive years, the father is like drilling them, like, testing them on this, between 30 and 40, a woman's most productive years between 20 and 30. When is a child old enough to leave the house? And the answer is, when the first, like, dog tooth? canine tooth, like falls out. Dog tooth, by the way, interesting.

It's the same in the Greek, Kino Dantes. It's like wrong, right? It's not how you name that. It's not the name of the thing. But at one of these interviews with Thelanthemos, he's like, I didn't want to call it canine tooth because that's correct, you know, it's scientific. Yeah, yeah. Dog tooth is like, it means some other things.

There's like a dog tooth fish. There's like a dog tooth, like design pattern, but it doesn't mean exactly the thing it's supposed to mean, and it feels. wrong. Yeah, completely. Yeah. There's a dog tooth wave as well, isn't that? I think so.

It's a waveform, and I think the film opens with some stills of waveforms too, which I assumed were dog tooth waveforms. Anyway, that's the poster, yeah. I've been mulling getting a tattoo of that fucking waveform. So a child is ready to leave the home when the dog tooth falls out, which of course we know, but it doesn't. And of course, when you're ready to leave the home, you have to learn to drive, right? But when are you ready to learn how to drive?

when the dog tooth grows back, which, of course, it never does. Of course. Absolutely. What's a pussy? It's a big lie. Who's Frank Sinatra? He's your granddad.

He's your grandfather. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This fucking bet. Because he's like, do you want to hear your grandfather sing? And so he puts on a Frank Sinatra record. And because it's in English. Fly me to the moon.

Yeah, because it's in English, which none of them speak. He interprets for them in Greek. Yeah, and he's just not right. Not at all, right? Just saying other things. He makes it a song about like, I love my family, I'll always try hard, I'll never leave home. I never leave my house, I love you, I will never leave you. I really like this.

Yeah, they dance as well, and they're terrible dancers because... Yeah, they suck. Because they've had no outside influence on it, like they're just moving their body rhythmically. There's no... Beautiful, beautiful, devised theatre prompt here of dance like someone who has never seen anyone else dance. Right? Yeah, yeah. It's just kind of like jerking, like.

like kind of rhythmic movement. Yeah. So Christina comes back. By the way, in the son's room, there's a portrait of the father which looks very dictatorial, or it's being slowly like painted in. And she says, I saw you in one of my dreams. Do you even have dreams? And we see that his dreams, he says, oh yeah, I had a dream.

My mom fell in the pool. She goes, and then what? And it's like, nothing, that was it. And it's like, you have hindered this like boy's linguistic. linguistic capacity so much that like it has affected his imagination. Yeah, he can't even dream. And in contrast, Christina's like, oh, in my dream, like, I was walking in the woods with your dad and they're like birds or stuff and then you were there and you were a zombie.

It's crazy. Hey, you've like foreclosed his imagination. Yeah, she's like, I gotta stop swallowing my Prague. I gotta booth that shit when I swallow it. It gives me crazy dreams. She says she dreamed that he was a zombie, which gives you a little comic playoff later on. where he asks his mum what a zombie is and she tells him it's a little yellow flower

and the later he's like, he's like, I want to talk about that scene. Well, let's talk about it now, in fact. And so all throughout the film, the lighting has been very soft. It's very desaturated. And the colours are very muted. And then for reasons I haven't been able to figure out,

just in this one scene where the sun asks mum, what a zombie is and she says it's a small flower, there's very, very harsh sunlight on his face and casting a very sparse. dark shadow. And I'm not entirely sure what you're going to say there. Maybe it was just like, my lying director wasn't in that day. But like, I just, I noticed it. I noticed it. And I'm like, ah, yeah, what is the film doing here? I don't know. It's like, dissent is introduced. Yeah, outside influence, I think, is.

Hmm. But so. Right in, if you know what the lighting in that one scene was about. So she, she goes to the eldest daughter again for sex. And the eldest daughter is able to turn it around on her. And this is where she pulls to like, you know, what would my parents do if they found out I was licking your keyboard? And she goes through her bag, Christina's bag, to see if there's anything that she wants. And what she has in there is three, like two rental videotapes. Mm-hmm. Objective fucking power, right? Yeah. We don't yet find out what they are. We find out in a very fun way. Yes. And she kind of blackmails Christina for like a week with these videotapes.

She doesn't even know what they are, right? She recognizes a video tape, which isn't like... Because of the home movies. Yeah, and so she watches them secretly at night. We still don't see what they are. This is a beautiful, beautiful shot. I think consciously evokes Anna Karina and Viv Savi at the cinema, right? We see her looking at the TV, the fucking TV blow.

And she's just looking, she's just looking at static, right? Because clearly she has finished the movie. and is just there in silence like digesting it yes yes you have seen a film for the first time ever you have just experienced

outside influence and it's so good it's so good and she conceals this from that yes yeah he comes down and says what are you doing she says oh I couldn't sleep and then hides the tapes right

and then the next morning we see her as she's brushing her teeth and going about her day like playing and almost like rehearsing a conversation that she wants to have with her dad where she says, I want to be a fighter, I want to be like, Mr. Balboa. She's pretending to be Rocky in her bathroom mirror,

and she's like doing her teeth. Oh, one of the tapes was fucking Rocky Balbaugh. It's so fucking cute. And the thing is, right, one of the reasons why I love this movie, I'm like the Academy, right? I love movies about how important movies are. And this is one of those. You know my opinion.

This is, this is the whole medium like contorting itself. to suck itself off, right? To be like, this is emancipatory, this medium that we have in front of us, right? Even just Rocky, even just seeing Rocky at a lifetime of never having seen a movie before and it gives you so many tools. Like, I really love, her acting is so fucking goodness, because she's like faking, being Rocky, she's doing like the weird mouth thing and be like, oh, oh, and like spit, like, red-eyed water out.

She's like, shut up, boxing. To be clear, we've said before that like... The way a child would do after watching a movie they thought was cool. Like, the way I remember doing all the way home from Marvel films would be like, just, like, good. Really good. And a lot of the stuff, like, is trash. It's trash, right? Like, we'll do Rocky. I'm sure, and I'm probably going to be like, this fucking sucks. But the thing is, right, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. The original Rocky's great. And it introduces an uncontrolled element, right? Not least because it introduces the concept of, like, righteous violence. But also, because, like,

Yorgos fucking loves action movies. He's, an action movie guy. I found a quote from him about how he really enjoyed, like, the Bourne, the Born Ultimatum. Is he know he can make them? Is he aware that he's allowed to make action movies himself? Listen, if you ask me, give the next Bond film to one director, hands down. Your Wills would be very funny. Hands fucking down. Born Ultimatum, we gave it an eight out of, on the Scum's system, so that's pretty fucking good, yeah. It was pretty good. I just don't know what the Ultimatum was. Like, commit to this program.

Yeah. And then we see them in the pool, right? Where they've been fucking... Yeah, I love this. This is so fucking, it's like, joyous, right? After this completely antiseptic thing, this, like, riotously funny bit where she's, like, she's, she does the shark from jaws. She reenacts jaws in the pool.

And tries to, like, bite her brother with her arms. And he's, like, completely baffled by this. She's like, that black like a doll's eyes. And he's just like, what the fuck? She's doing lines that don't bear any resemblance to, she's not doing a scene. She's like clearly struggling really hard to remember lines. And so she just has the, like, she, she bites him and then she does like Hooper's line, like, I want to be sure, you want to be sure, we all want to be sure.

It's just like, it's really, it's really, really good. It's cute. But then. And then she confesses. Yeah, she turns herself in. And predictably, this is horrible, right? Like there's, this is sort of cousin, kissing cousin, incest joke, to another scene in Alps that's a lot like this, where you know that the violence is coming and it has like a long lead up. Yeah.

Well, like, you see the dad's sitting with the videotapes, and he tells her to go and get the duct tape. And he like tapes of like a VHS cassette too. his hand and then just like beats the shit out of it with it. Yeah. It's horrible. Yeah. And we then kind of know from the next scene that this doesn't work. Yes.

Because she's there with the younger sister and she says, I want you to call me Bruce from now on. I've really, really like this. Because obviously they don't have names. Like they've been denied names for 20 plus years and she's just like come up on one. And it's like, Fuck it, Bruce, why not? Yeah, she says, whenever you call me Bruce, I'll turn around. And they practice.

And they do like a call response where she just like moves to different parts of the room. And like the younger says goes Bruce and like she turns around to look at her. Yeah. Yeah. So obviously having seen the movie, she's one of the key takeaways she's gotten from Jaws and Rocky is the concept of a name. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like you call you say a name and somebody turns around.

You can demolish the master's house with Rocky Balboa's tools. Yeah. Also, the sister doesn't quite get it, although she's got the spirit, because she's like, she's looking at her sister's back, and she's like, oh, I want a name too. I want to be called back. And her sister has to be like, you can't be called back. A back is a back. You have to have a name.

Yeah. Yeah. Good non-binary name, though. I don't know called SOC. Yeah, all right. Yeah. Guess who's back? Jesus.

Incidentally, Bruce is, it's ever spoken in the movie as far as I remember, but it's the nickname of the like animatronic shark in jaws. It is. Yeah. Which is just really nice. But so obviously now Christina has to get some like retribution from this. And she, like, the father goes to the house and like, again, because he's a cheap thug and he's kind of pathetic, right? Like, he beats the fuck out of her with her VCR.

Yeah. And she doesn't like deserve this. She's like, okay, she's sexually exploitative and like, you know, kind of, um, But I mean, like... There's a 50-50 on whether she's being sexually exploited herself as well here. Yes, yeah. It's very hard to untangle who the bad guy is other than the father. Yeah, and Newark's doesn't like judging stuff, which, fair enough.

Yeah, exactly. It's a kind of standoffish non-judgmental style of film making, which I like. Yeah, here's some things that happened. It happens as a natural consequence of some other things that happened. As he's finished beating her and, like, throws the VCR on the floor, he stands in her door and he says, I hope your kids have bad influences and develop a bad person. personality, which is so perfectly like focus on the family kind of, like,

because you've introduced this like malign, like adult influence, literally in the form of video types, right? You've, you've kind of like, you've poisoned my children against me. I hope your kids are like also bad influences, right? Yeah. I hope no one protects your kids. Yeah. This is the only real sense of like justification of what he's doing, right?

that this is a kind of like, you know, Castle of Purity thing. Like, he's kind of like, yeah, I'm protecting my family, right? And I think this is one of the preoccupations of the movie is, well, what do you, what are you doing? What are you willing to do in order to protect your family? And what are you doing to them when you do that, you know? Yeah, I mean, it made me think a lot about a really, really useful concepts I picked up from a philosopher called Sarah Ahmed a few years ago

in her book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, where she discusses how we, describe groups like the Ku Klux Klan as like hate groups, right? And they would say, and really mean it when they say, they're like, no, we don't hate anyone. We just like love white people. In the same way this guy was like, no, I don't hate my kids. I love my kids. Look at what I'm doing for them.

Like, he experiences this as a very positive thing. And what Sarah Ahmed points out is that what this is really describing is a narcissistic love of the self. It's, I love you as long as you are like me and do what I say. Yes. That's the kind of love that the K. have for white people or like for any human beings. It's like, I love you as long as you're like me. In the same way that like, you know, kids in the UK

who are kicked out by their parents because they're LGBTQ, their parents go, no, I love my kids. It's like, no, you love them as long as they're like you. You don't, you love them to change or be different than you. What you really love is yourself. Yeah. The sort of capacity to change is a sort of like unthinkable, like thing that has to be prevented at all costs, right? Yeah, absolutely.

It's a movie about being transgender, not least because, Because you have, like, her picking, like, a sort of male name, right? Yeah, because you bark like a dog and you fuck your sister. Yeah. Speaking of. Yeah. Oh, Christ. Yeah.

Here we go. So now we have a problem, which is that now we don't have a Christina and somebody's got to jack off this son. Someone's got to fuck him. We can't let anyone else into the house. Oh, well, we've got two sisters here. Yeah. We'll let one of them do it. And my note here says, eyes closed, bathtub, incest sex audition.

Yes. That is, yeah. It's horrible. It's excruciating. This is a, like, he, like, picks which of his sisters he's gonna fuck. And he picks the eldest. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

The next shot is her mom literally grooming her. Like, she puts lipstick on her. We have this, again, horrible, excruciating, torturous sex scene, right? And afterwards, the eldest daughter, Bruce, like, she lies back on the bed. And she says to him, do that again, bitch, and I'll rip your guts out, which is from Rocky 4. And I think learning boundaries from like of... Once again, from Rocky. From Rocky 4.

It's like, it's so good. It's nice that we got some specificity. Like, wasn't Rocky 1, 2 or 2 is Rocky 4? It was Rocky 4 specifically and chores. This is where my notes say, that's either a very good prosthetic or she really. just jacked that guy's dick, you'll go's my man, you can't do that. No, she does. Yeah, she jacked that guy's dick off, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, she like threatens him in this way that like neither of them really understand exactly. She's like, you and your clan, you're not gonna last in this neighborhood. And it's like bizarre, but it's so effective too. Yeah. We also see that she's beginning to test boundaries a little bit.

Like, she, unbeknownst to her parents, goes into mom and dad's room, open the safe and uses the phone, but like she doesn't know how to dial. So as soon as she gets like, the number you've dialed has not been recognized, she like gets scared and puts it back, right? Yeah, as you would. She tells the youngest girl, she says, my dog tooth is loose, look, and it's not, but it's like, she wants it to be. I think my dog tooth is moving.

Like, mm, we're getting close to something here. Getting ready to go. I found out about the outside world and I've had a horrific experience at home, like, I'm ready to get out of there. I've seen Rocky Four. I saw the teeth. The TV glow! Yes!

It was literally just now! Yes! Absolutely! So good. I'm gonna talk about I saw the TV glow again in a bit, but so... We should probably just watch I saw the TV glow, shouldn't we? God, yes. Whatever, it's your fucking bonus book next, I'mu.

The dad is like, it's your mother and I's wedding anniversary. We will, therefore, like, decorate the house with balloons, and we will have a party. And we see the kids put on this creepy... creepy, shitty, fascist art. Yeah. Where they're dancing, again, as we've established, they've never seen dancing. So it's like, like all fascist art, it's disconnected from any kind of like outside influence, which has left it frenetic, meaningless, bad, vaguely traditional.

Like the sun is there or the guitar playing a kind of Greek-ish melody. It kind of sucks. Yeah. Yeah. And the dancing that Eldis does is, or the Brewster. in fact, is just like not even comprehensible as dancing in parts. It's like, like, shirky, rhythmically,

like, moving around and like, it's, it's exactly what you would do if you gave somebody the task of, like, unstructed free associative physical improv, actually. Yeah. Which is what it is. And because this goes on for so long, she kind of runs out of dancing. The younger sister gets tired and goes and sits down.

And the older sister, she does Jennifer Beals flash dance. She does flash dance. Yeah, she does the choreography from Flash dance, which it's, it's so. So, because you see the father realize that that's like an outside influence that must have happened. Because like, how the fuck is she actually dancing? Yeah, it's beautiful.

It's beautiful. It's so, so good. It's like indecent. It's like scandalous. The first time I saw this scene, I fucking wet genuinely, right? Because I thought it was such a powerful statement about like art and life and the like the sort of like human desire to connect that sort of like grows past whatever fucking tyranny you set down for it in the form of flash dance, right?

And she like dances herself into exhaustion and then eats an entire cake. And it's just like, yes, women rock. Yes, yeah, let's go! I've never seen flash dance, so I did not appreciate that's what was happening, and therefore I don't think I got as much out of that scene as you did. But now that I know that's from something else, I'm like, oh, that's really powerful It's from like a kind of like 80s dance movie. Like it doesn't matter that it's not like meaningful.

Yeah, it's enough, like Rocky Ford. Like it's another pretty bad movie realistically. But like when it's the only one you've seen, it's the best thing ever. Yes. It's like update it for modern Abbey audiences and she's doing the party rock shuffle. And I'm like, oh, that's the party rock travel. She's doing fucking TikTok dancers. Spent ages learning how to do that in the CCF mess.

Damn, she's doing the Save America for Trump dance in the alleyway. Take me back to the Sufmast. This is a film about being transgender. Yes. Yes. There's a scene we've skipped, which is unfortunate, because it's the fulcrum of my entire argument, which is a bit where suddenly the parents wake up in the middle of the night

because the son is screaming. He's yelling out. And the father goes in there and the son is like, she, and pointing at the younger sister who's in there, she hit me with a hammer on the leg. And the sister goes, no, no. a cat did it and it just, it ran out the window just now. Yes.

And this is fucking perfect because this is so clearly like the reality that the father has established where to these kids like the lie, oh, a cat did it is so naturally like the right thing to say that it doesn't, it passes muster for them. But obviously we are in a position of the father where we know, no it fucking didn't. A cat couldn't do that. But because of the world he's built, he has to go like, go over to the window and close it and go over to a son and be like, did you take your anti-cat medicines? And like, he has to buy into the world he's created to keep it going.

And I really, really like that. It's a fascist reproduction, right? Exactly. The younger sister, who we have seen, like, randomly cutting people, who is just this, like, little psychopath who's been, like, musilating Barbies and stuff, has, like, instinctually developed her way towards lying to tilt things in her own favor. Yes.

but the reality she's basing off it is so wrong as to make it ridiculous. Yeah. I think it's nice that the film shows us that like people will push against this tyranny, not always in the kind of wholesome, I'm gonna be rocky and I'm gonna like be my own independent person and dance way, but also in the way that like, they might get more fucked up. Yeah. Just be like, well, I'm gonna slice my brother up and then lie about it and say that a cat did it. This is your, I did find a way to work this in after all.

This is your functionalist history of like genocide, right? This is someone who has been raised in a sort of an environment that is so cumulatively radicalizing that they're like seeking to like justify the things that they want to do and seeking approval for the things that they want to do, which is sadistic, by being like, did I do a good job, like, you know, liquidating these enemies of the people or whatever. I wanted to hit my brother in the kneecap with a hammer, therefore didn't I do a good job doing the thing you're always telling us to do, protecting us from cats? It's like...

It's perfect. It's really, really great. I'm sorry, we skipped over that. No, no. But it provides a counterpoint to what the older sister does, which is. Yes. It's sort of also reminiscent of a scene in Titan, which is not as good of a movie, but also a movie about being transgender. I think it's pronounced Titanic.

I don't think they, no, they fucked in the car on Titanic. Draw me like one of your French cars. So it's a movie about being transgender. Being transgender is sometimes painful and scary and gross. Sometimes you've got to do it yourself. Sometimes. And to be clear, it fucking rules. This is a great scene.

Listen, I think there's a sort of sharp divide, right? If you watch this scene and are just horrified and you don't get it, you're not, it's not for you. But if you're watching the scene and you do get it, it's like very, very strong, right? Yeah. She, like, gets a little dumbbell, and you see she, like, takes a couple of practice swings, and she knocks out with, like, three tries, her own canine tooth. And you see, she's looking at the mirror, there's blood everywhere, she is grinning. No, she loves it, yeah, yeah.

This is the good shit, this is what it's about. Like, like, authenticity and liberation, like, very painful experiences sometimes, but fuck are they ever worth it? Yeah. It's like, oh yeah, you're mutilating the self. Fucking every second mutilates the self. Just, if it's for your own good, hell fucking yes. Yes, yeah, absolutely. DIY, baby.

Just knock those teeth up. You have to take this stuff into your own hands sometimes. And she leaves her tooth in the sink. And she walks away from the house, covered in blood. Very conscious, I think, allusion to, like, a lot of horror movies with the final girl. Yeah. She's like, walking away from the house, covered in blood. and hides in the boot of Dad's car.

Yes. I've made a note here that says, these parents have to be killed. Yes, clearly. And I mean no. Yeah, no, absolutely. Now stand by that. Just sends someone around, but...

The youngest daughter, like, wakes the dad up. And she wakes him up by licking him. Don't lick your dad! Yeah, once again, stop with the lick. Like a dog. Do you want an animal or a friend, and the choice is fucking animal, clearly, because they're licking.

Yeah, she licks his hands. She asks Dad for the harpoon. And at this point, Anton Chekhov wakes up at the back. The theater goes, oh, oh, because dad goes, no. There is incidentally a sort of like maybe deeper illusion in this scene, because she licks his hand to wake him out. When that doesn't work, she like licks his chest. In order to get him up, she says, I can lick your ear if you want.

And given the kind of mutability of language that we've seen, it's entirely possible. What the fuck is an ear? We don't know. Who knows what ear is? Maybe just fully alludes to something like much more straightforwardly sexually abusive. Yeah. But so we get some great acting off the dad here. The panic as he realizes, as he goes into the bathroom sees the like blood everywhere and the tooth.

Mm-hmm. And realizes that he's like lost control. He knows as well. This is a bit where he kind of like loses his reason, right? He knows that the kids only know that they can get out in the car. Yeah. And he panics and he goes. out without the car. Like, he walks outside.

He doesn't think to check the car the only way she thinks she can leave. Because as soon as you've like demolished enough of this stuff, it's all gone. And he's thinking of her like, oh, fuck, she knows what like, bones are. She like probably just got a fucking Uber, I don't know. Like. Yeah. So he runs out down the lane and obviously he can't find it. In the dark, while all of the like, all of the others are like in dog position. At the doorway of the gate.

Yeah, barking. Barking. And actually, what I really like is that the youngest yells out. Yes, yes. Really good. Really good. Really cute. Even by naming yourself, you have planted a seed there. It was also only at this point in the movie did I realize we've had no non-diagetic music at all.

Yeah, yeah. There is no music in this except what the characters themselves can hear, which is a really interesting choice. And I think a very powerful one, too, to just be like, there's no music in these people's world except what they're given. There is no... A music in a film can suggest like in a thought or emotion or like a feeling that is not vocalized

and the fact that the soundtrack is just sterile, is absent. Just suggests so much about the inner lives of not only the kids themselves who have been deprived of it, but also like of the fucking parents. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Horrific. Fantastic. Just incredible. He talks to the mum and this is again another reason why the parents must be killed. He basically just says, oh, it's fine, we'll get the dog back, so, you know, kind of replaces her, right? The mum seems completely broken by this.

Yes. Doesn't have any lines, but just cries. Yeah. You get the sense that this whole construction lasts like three or four more weeks. It's not lasting. Mm-hmm. He mentions the skulls her as well. It's an interesting kind of thing, is he like gets her a glass of orange juice and she's not drinking

it. And as he's like, oh, it's fine, we'll just replace her with the dog. also like, you know, if you're just gonna let that get warm, don't drink it in the first place. And then the next morning, with Bruce in the trunk of the car, he drives to work at the factory, no Christina, of course, and he goes into the factory, we see the Mercedes parked outside, and we just hold on the trunk. And then the movie fucking ends. That's the film, baby.

I love, I love this style of ending, right? Like, the same thing I was saying about fucking clout, right? if you cut it when the phone rings, right? Yeah. No spoilers for clout. I'm gonna watch clout tonight. I'm gonna get clout mode and I'm clute-pilled. Hell yeah, text me about clute.

Clute it up. This is not an ambiguous ending, I submit. Not at all. It is not even slightly an ambiguous ending because you are saying this character in a film has learned the techniques of film character, right? And specifically action hero, right? Yeah.

Of course she gets out of the trunk, right? Just fucking Rocky Balboa. She's Bruce the shark from Jaws, who came back for like three sequels where the shark hunts the fucking, like, Brody family to the Bahamas. Like, she gets out of the fucking car, of course she does. Do you believe in movies or not? So, well, mine would say, does she get out? I don't know.

Do you? Yes, also the I saw the TV glow ending. Exactly. Right? Which is that like, did you get out of the thing? you fucking knock your own dog tooth out? Did you get out of the situation? If it's a situation, are you willing to get out of the situation?

Yeah. This movie offers you a route to do that, you know? I don't know if I would have got it. It's a real like jumping in the same river twice thing, but I wish I had seen this when I was younger, like, genuine. Yeah. Now I'm also remembering that Rocky's climactic speech at the end of Rocky 4 is something like, if I can change and you can change, maybe we can all change.

Yeah. In the context of like the Soviet Union of the USA. Like Rocky Briggs, with spoilers for Rocky, Rocky brings, Rockie ends the Cold War by winning a boxing match. Yeah, it does. And everyone claps. Yeah. This movie rules.

The movies represent a possibility of like growth and change and becoming a different person and becoming transgender and like not living with your shitty parents anymore. And, you know, I think this is why it's one of my favorite movies, you know? Right. I watched this movie just before we recorded this. So, like, throughout the course of, like, recording the podcast, I was still, like, marinating in it and, like, ruminating on it.

I didn't have a phenomenal time of watching it the first time round, but I'll tell you this for free. After this conversation, I will watch it again, and I will have a much better time of it. Yeah. I hadn't teased out a bunch of shit that you gave me halfway through this, and, like, this, I, you know what? Five stars.

Fuck it. Good movie. It's real good. It's real good. Excited to watch more of his shit. This was my first Yorgos movie. Yeah. One to watch. Keep an eye.

Yours. I'll put you on to this guy. Yorgos Lan Theimos. I hear he's pretty good. This isn't just a recommendation. This is an order. Go and watch Dog Tooth. Run, do not walk.

Yeah. I would love for us to watch some more Yorgas Lan Theimos movies. I would love for us to watch Alps, which is in many ways kind of dog tooth too. Ooh. And, yeah. Dog teeth.

It's my pick next on a bonus episode. And like, I saw the TV Globe would make an excellent companion to this, I was also weighing up making you watch something incredibly dumb that has nothing to do with anything. I'll do that for my one, maybe. Maybe we should watch I saw the TV glow next, although I'm like afraid to return to it. I'm afraid to watch it for much the same reason, you know, like Dogtooth ambushed me, and if I'd known it was going to go this hard and have this effect on me, I don't know if I would

have had it in. This is the thing, like Dogtooth advocates for an unexpected movie like Rocky 4, and, yeah, No, absolutely. I want to watch this. I think you can build I saw the TV glow up and your head a little too much sometimes as well. Possibly. Go into it without any real expectations, I think. Also, by the way, as part of the visual language of this movie and what it's saying

about, like, you know, as an allegory for fascism, as an allegory for like suburbia, for the family, any of this stuff. I think it has a lot in common with two other films, which you may be interested in, funny games by Michael Hanukkah and the zone of interest. Zone of interest I watched recently. Well, it's a good movie. It's certainly not an exciting or happy movie to watch, but it's something that's unbelievably useful and good.

Yeah. Yeah, okay. In that case, let's do I saw the TV glow next. Let's fucking do it. If only because, like, it would be nice to actually watch a film that actually is about being transgender. Like, not even as a joke on a big thing. That is literally textually what the film is about.

And I'll save Bulletproof Monk for another time. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. I know, I know, right? Given that when I saw the other big transgender movie that's out at the moment, The People's Joker, and I, like, dissociated for two days. I'm going to watch, I saw the TV Globe with my wife so that she can hug me if I get scared or sad.

That's a good idea. I'm going to have to watch it again. We'll be back to record that soon. The next mainline episodes... It's a Johnny English 3 will be the next one coming out. Jesus Christ. And there will be video of that as well coming out so you can see the fit, which was exquisite. I'm going to take my microphone with me.

to L.A. because I'm going to the premiere of Dracula's ex-girlfriend and also to the Emmys. So, yeah. The next episode will be California, Abby, once again. I know, nuts. All right, fantastic.

This has been a real pleasure. Yes. As always. Thank you so much for subscribing and we will see you next time. Bye everyone. Thank you for listening to this curtain. Goodbye.

Goodbye, everyone. Thank you for listening to yet another episode of Kill James Bond. This isn't the jazz outro from the original episode. This is a new one that I'm recording for the re-release. Since this episode took the slot of a free episode, next week will be a bonus. And that bonus episode is Abby's pick, which is Patrick Swayze in Black Dog. That's a truck movie, baby.

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