Dogtooth is a film that delights in disconcerting the viewer and refuses to supply any easy answers.
If there’s one thing that mainstream cinema demands, it’s an explanation. Character motivation and plot are continually hammered home until the audience understands what’s going on and – more importantly – why. It is the refusal to play this game that makes Dogtooth feel so devastating, unique and fresh. With echoes of David Lynch, Michael Haneke and even Stanley Kubrick, Yorgos Lanthimos eschews the fantastical to present a world in which horror is grounded in mundanity.
A mother and father decide to shelter their family of three children from the outside world by convincing them that everything beyond their secluded compound will destroy them. Thus, stray cats are in fact evil creatures capable of killing in an instant, and aeroplanes are nothing more than toys moving overhead.
With their own language and customs, and knowing no other rules apart from the ones placed upon them by their father, the children are far removed from the (so-called) norms of society. Yet as the elder son enters late adolescence, the father decides to risk bringing an outsider into the fold to allow the young man to satisfy his sexual needs. But this promises to bring their world crashing down.
Lanthimos creates an atmosphere that juxtaposes the alien with the horribly familiar. Our protagonists (and the refusal to name them only adds to the sense of alienation that permeates the film) inhabit a sun-drenched idyll that contains all the trappings of a successful middle-class life. When their dysfunctional nature comes to the fore it’s with a sense of terrible logic, as the director evokes the dark comedy hidden within unsettling scenes and events.
The performances are superb, especially from Christos Stergioglou as the anonymous patriarch whose reasons for shutting his family away remain tantalisingly unsaid. Indeed, Dogtooth is a film that delights in disconcerting the viewer and refuses to supply any easy answers (in fact, any answers at all). But it never feels like an exercise in audience-baiting; rather it is a sharp and alarming indictment of modern society.
Published 23 Apr 2010
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