Starring Christos Stergioglou. In Greek with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Friday to Monday, March 18 to 21, and Wednesday and Thursday, March 23 and 24, at the Vancity Theatre

Dogtooth, another enigmatic art film from the Greek underground, was directed by Giorgos Lanthimos, who played a small role in like-minded director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg. Here, we also have a pair of strangely asocial girls doing choreographed, sexually charged duets. But this time the setting is even more artificial and the targets much broader.

As in Attenberg, the focus is on people over 20 who seem much younger. This time it’s because two sisters (Aggeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni) and a brother (Hristos Passalis) have been raised in isolation by a wealthy businessman (stage veteran Christos Stergioglou) who keeps them and his docile wife (Michele Valley) tucked away in a rural compound. They are cut off from the outside world except for a hidden telephone and the jets that fly overhead—and even those, they’re told, are nothing but meaningless toys that can fall from the sky.

With his arbitrary shifts of law and sudden bursts of unexpected violence—and the darkly comic movie has the power to shock—the father could be a stand-in for the leader of any totalitarian state, monarchy, personality cult, or maybe just the “family unit”, whatever that is. He sometimes seems to be running a weird scientific experiment. That may be one reason why he brings in Christina, a female security guard (Anna Kalaitzidou)—and the only character given a name here—to service the blankly handsome son. There’s little indication that he wanted those services to drift over to the eldest daughter.

The world of (notably dated) pop culture does intrude, although not in the ways Dad anticipates, and some of this is quite funny, in a superstylized way. By the time his wife and kids drop to all fours and start barking like dogs, it may prove one WTF moment too many.