Teeth (2008)

Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth arrived at Sundance in 2007 with a title that promised anatomical horror and a premise that delivered it. Dawn O'Keefe, a teenage spokesperson for a Christian abstinence group, discovers she is a living instance of the vagina dentata myth, and the film proceeds to dispatch a series of men who mistake her body for their property. The tone is comedy horror, the budget was two million dollars, and the critical consensus has spent nearly two decades calling it a feminist spin on familiar tropes. That description holds up.

Here the social consciousness is structural, not spoken. Dawn's anatomy functions as a literal enforcement of bodily autonomy, and each man who violates it, the aggressive suitor at the swimming hole, the gynecologist who reaches inside her without a glove, the stepbrother with his own ugly history, receives a consequence proportionate to his crime. The film never stops to explain itself. No monologue about consent, no character drafted in to articulate the thesis. The audience is trusted to connect the dots, a vanishing courtesy. The omissions are equally telling. Race never surfaces as a concern. Class and capital go unexamined. The environment does not enter the frame. The body here is a weapon, not a site of self-acceptance, and the film has no interest in the vocabulary of affirmation. It is a nasty piece of work with a thesis, and it knows better than to lecture.

Teeth remains a curio of the late 2000s, a horror comedy that made its argument through viscera and let the audience do the moral arithmetic. Its feminist content is real and unmistakable, yet it arrives without a pamphlet, which is why it still plays as provocation instead of homework. The film has since been adapted into a stage musical, which suggests the culture has decided the premise was always about more than shock. The classification is straightforward. This is a film of one idea, executed with conviction, and it never once asks for our approval.