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The nameless patriarch of the nameless family that is the focus of Yorgos Lanthimos' remarkable Dogtooth is heard through a tape recorder as his children begin their day. His pre-recorded lesson instructs the three twenty-something children, two girls and one boy, on several definitions of words like road trip and shotgun; a road trip, as he puts it, is a material that hard floors are made from. Later, his wife (Michele Valley) will instruct her son that a "zombie" is a small yellow flower.
Locked inside a compound while the father (Christos Stergioglou) makes a living as a higher-up in a local factory, the three children, played by Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni and Hristos Passalis, spend their days dreaming up games (who can hold their finger under a hot faucet the longest?), working out and reading medical books. The son (Passalis) is given a bonus activity: The father pays Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), a factory security guard, to come to the compound and pleasure the son. All is well in Repressionville until Christina barters with the eldest daughter (Papoulia), giving her a glow-in-the-dark headband if the eldest will lick her, uh, "keyboard."
Essentially a set of threaded vignettes, Dogtooth thematically runs the gamut from censorship and capitalism to sexuality and theater. The father has edited reality out of his children's lives and replaced it with what he perceives as a "safe" existence. This wild narrative the father has created for his children, inside the perverse narrative that Lanthimos co-wrote with Efthymis Filippou, which includes airplanes that turn into toys and the bloody faking of a cat attack, is in direct opposition to the stillness and sterility of Lanthimos' expert compositions. The result is a sense of surrealism that is worthy of Buñuel, contorting and thrashing inside an aesthetic indebted both to Ulrich Seidl and Michael Haneke.
Chock full of absurdist routines, Dogtooth hits its comical apex with a saccharine translation of Frank Sinatra's "Fly Me to the Moon" but gets sensationally self-reflexive and quite violent when the eldest daughter ups the ante, demanding Christine to hand over a pair of movie rentals. Soon, the eldest daughter is reenacting big scenes from Rocky and Jaws which attracts some unwanted attention. As expected, the father takes retribution on both the daughter and Christina; less expected is the daughter's climactic act of defiance.
Of the many positive aspects of Dogtooth, the fact that Lanthimos uses imagery and insinuations to build his narrative is the most prominent. The film's title is derived from a rule the father has created: The children are only ready to leave the compound when a dogtooth (a cuspid) falls out. But this instance and, arguably, a metaphorical exchange the father has with a dog trainer are the only blatant moments in Lanthimos' film. Pitched with fearless black humor and shocks of gasp-worthy horror, Dogtooth makes for an intensely unsettling watch but as much as it shakes up the monotony of so many dysfunctional family dramas and dark comedies, it's also refreshingly frank about the dangers of trying to keep everyone and everything "safe."
Aka Kynodontas
Locked inside a compound while the father (Christos Stergioglou) makes a living as a higher-up in a local factory, the three children, played by Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni and Hristos Passalis, spend their days dreaming up games (who can hold their finger under a hot faucet the longest?), working out and reading medical books. The son (Passalis) is given a bonus activity: The father pays Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), a factory security guard, to come to the compound and pleasure the son. All is well in Repressionville until Christina barters with the eldest daughter (Papoulia), giving her a glow-in-the-dark headband if the eldest will lick her, uh, "keyboard."
Essentially a set of threaded vignettes, Dogtooth thematically runs the gamut from censorship and capitalism to sexuality and theater. The father has edited reality out of his children's lives and replaced it with what he perceives as a "safe" existence. This wild narrative the father has created for his children, inside the perverse narrative that Lanthimos co-wrote with Efthymis Filippou, which includes airplanes that turn into toys and the bloody faking of a cat attack, is in direct opposition to the stillness and sterility of Lanthimos' expert compositions. The result is a sense of surrealism that is worthy of Buñuel, contorting and thrashing inside an aesthetic indebted both to Ulrich Seidl and Michael Haneke.
Chock full of absurdist routines, Dogtooth hits its comical apex with a saccharine translation of Frank Sinatra's "Fly Me to the Moon" but gets sensationally self-reflexive and quite violent when the eldest daughter ups the ante, demanding Christine to hand over a pair of movie rentals. Soon, the eldest daughter is reenacting big scenes from Rocky and Jaws which attracts some unwanted attention. As expected, the father takes retribution on both the daughter and Christina; less expected is the daughter's climactic act of defiance.
Of the many positive aspects of Dogtooth, the fact that Lanthimos uses imagery and insinuations to build his narrative is the most prominent. The film's title is derived from a rule the father has created: The children are only ready to leave the compound when a dogtooth (a cuspid) falls out. But this instance and, arguably, a metaphorical exchange the father has with a dog trainer are the only blatant moments in Lanthimos' film. Pitched with fearless black humor and shocks of gasp-worthy horror, Dogtooth makes for an intensely unsettling watch but as much as it shakes up the monotony of so many dysfunctional family dramas and dark comedies, it's also refreshingly frank about the dangers of trying to keep everyone and everything "safe."
Aka Kynodontas
