Yorgos Lanthimos
2009
97 minutes
When you were a child you had a live vinyl comedy album by Steve Martin, A Wild and Crazy Guy. In one of the jokes on it, he suggests that a good prank to play when you are around children is to talk "wrong". The audience laughs knowingly, believing he's suggesting teaching children how to swear in a particularly filthy manner. However the joke takes an absurdist left turn when he imagines the child's first day at school where he raises his hand and asks the teacher, "May I mambo dogface to the banana patch?" This film is as if someone made this entire concept into a movie.
You reflect on your own childhood, which as an adult you realize after the fact contained a lot of strange experiences and circumstances that you never realized were not normal for other people. Every TV family's home and situation looked a little bit alien and strange to you, and as a small child it was difficult to tell what was supposed to be considered "normal". All the possibilities for how you might live as an adult seemed dizzying, and you imagined you could pick and choose between the aspects you liked. Maybe a Diff'rent Strokes apartment with some PeeWee's Playhouse vibes, or a somewhat less kooky Addams Family Victorian home located in a sufficiently large city to keep you entertained. You never liked it much when your father's rovings would land him out in the boring suburbs away from the action.
The dental horror in this one is enough to make you turn your head away squeamishly. You can almost taste the blood in your mouth during the worst scene of this.
And all in all you are glad that you grew up as an only child. This movie does nothing to make you feel any different about that.
Time to choose something different: