Teeth
2014 · 14m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Jennifer Cox
Genres: coming-of-age, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, surreal
Daisy Brown is a typical thirteen-year-old girl: she hates school, believes nobody understands her and has a mortal enemy called Leah, besides an unusual condition that makes her teeth grow constantly, a dental anomaly only known in rodents, and unfortunately, that is the least of her problems.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A thirteen-year-old girl with rodent teeth and a worse problem—yeah, that's the kind of premise that makes everyone else nervous and me immediately curious. Cox swings for something genuinely unsettling beneath the dark-comedy surface, refuses to let you settle into comfort, and that's exactly what subversive filmmaking should do.
Teeth sits uneasily between coming-of-age tradition and body-horror provocation, and while that formal tension is intriguing, the film's tonal instability—juggling surrealism with teenage mundanity—occasionally undercuts the thematic clarity one would expect from work this deliberately composed.
Cox's decision to treat the impossible (constantly regenerating teeth) as background detail rather than spectacle—letting the real horror live in what's 'only the least of her problems'—is the move that makes this work: a single tonal choice that reframes the entire film from gimmick into something genuinely haunting.