Dogtooth | Little White Lies

Dog­tooth

23 Apr 2010 / Released: 23 Apr 2010

Woman with wavy blonde hair, downcast expression, wearing a white lace top.
Woman with wavy blonde hair, downcast expression, wearing a white lace top.
4

Anticipation.

An exemplary showing on the festival circuit means that this Greek film has been talked up by many.

4

Enjoyment.

This is not easy viewing even despite the vein of dark humour that runs alongside the more disturbing elements. But there is something hypnotically compelling about the film.

4

In Retrospect.

A stunning experience that will leave you shaking afterwards.

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.

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