Dogtooth

[Howard Schumann]

DOGTOOTH (Kynodontas)

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Greece, (2009), 94 minutes

Winner of the Un Certain Regard Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth is a provocative and disturbing film about the effect on a middle-class suburban family when the father takes total control of the lives of the three adult children, restricting their access to the outside world. Presumably in their early to middle twenties, the three unnamed children, a boy and his two sisters (Christos Passalis, Aggeliki Papoulia, and Mary Tsoni) walk, talk, and act like zombies.

They are wooden, undeveloped emotionally, and uncertain about how to handle their sexual urges. Their affect is bland and they talk in short, choppy sentences, delivered without expression. Confined to their house and not allowed to set foot outside the gate that encloses a lovely garden and a swimming pool, they are told that only when their dogtooth falls out and then grows back will they be ready to leave the nest. Everything the children think, feel, and do is tightly controlled by their father (Christos Stergioglou) and mother (Michele Valley) who feed them lies about the world.

Words are distorted to the point of absurdity. They learn that "a motorway is a very strong wind, and "a carbine is a beautiful white bird." A woman’s sexual organs are called a typewriter, a zombie is a yellow flower, and Frank Sinatra is their grandfather. The father teaches them that they must be protected from the world because there are cats out there that are ferocious man-eaters, leading the brother to horribly kill a stray cat he sees in the garden with a shearing knife (it is stated that no animals were harmed in the making of the film).

On the outside, the siblings are docile, but underneath there are elements of rage that occasionally flare up as when the elder sister slashes her brother’s foot with a knife because he was playing with her toy airplane. Though the children have been home-schooled and seem intelligent, they spend their day playing bizarre games such as seeing who can keep their fingers under a hot water tap the longest, and smothering themselves with an anesthetic to see who will be the first to wake up. The insanity is even choreographed to a bizarre dance routine in which the elder sister works herself into such frenzy that she is ordered to stop by her father.

The only outside influence comes from Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), a security guard at the factory the father works at who is brought to the house blindfolded to have uninvolving sex with the brother. Though there is no rape or sexual abuse, there is a physical assault when the elder sister watches a VHS tape of the films Rocky and Jaws in exchange for sexual favors from Christina and is hit over the head with the videos by her father. Viewers get a repeat showing of the father’s violent tendencies when Christina is likewise battered with a VCR for “bringing evil” into their home.

Her presence in the home does have the effect of loosening the household’s tightly-woven structure, however, and brings the film to a powerful but ambiguous end. Lanthimos offers few clues as to what he is trying to say and the viewer must decide whether the film is a darkly humorous social/political/economic satire in the tradition of Luis Bunuel, a sci-fi horror story in the mold of Michael Haneke, an attack on capitalism, a reaction to the excesses of home schooling, or something else. Whatever meaning you ascribe to it, Dogtooth is a jarring experience that you are not likely to soon forget.

GRADE: A

[Chris Knipp]

I may see this soon. It is actually on Instant Play on Netflix, and showing at the IFC Center in NY once a day.

[Chris Knipp]

Yorgos Lanthimos: DOGTOOTH (2009)
Review by Chris Knipp
http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/1839/dogtooth.jpg
CHRISTOS PASSALIS IN DOGTOOTH

Home schooling gone wild

Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth is an absurdist family tale in which three adult children (who have never been given names) are held prisoner by their factory manager father, while his wife also stays at home and only he is allowed to leave the house. Frankly, the blurb of this film made it sound so pointless and annoying that I chose to avoid it when it was shown as a part of the New Directors/New Films series at Lincoln Center a year ago, and people who went to the screening told me afterward that I'd made the right decision. Yet in very limited release this year it has gotten what Metacritic calls "generally favorable reviews." The idea, such as it is, seems to have been arresting enough to have garnered the film the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and a Best Foreign Oscar nomination. Finally I have seen Dogtooth at the IFC Center and I can say definitely: yes, it is attention-getting, but it is successful only as a provocation. Various comparisons come to mind: the Lars von Trier of Manderlay, the Orwell of Animal Farm; anti-utopias; Ionesco's plays; even the sick-making shut-in perversions of Pasolini's Salo. Haneke and Buñuel have been mentioned. But Dogtooth lacks the powerful ability to make you feel and think that those artists and their works have. If you remember Dogtooth, it's only because it's odd, not because of anything compelling about its home-movie level action or profound about its sketchy content. I also think of the Harmony Korine of Trash Humpers. But that movie has a troublingly authentic regional flavor and the feel of an ominous found object, while Dogtooth, for all its calculated moments of shock, seems much more the self-conscious conceptual piece, with consequent relative loss of impact. I was also reminded of Andrew Birkin's very successful film of Ian McEwan's novel about children hiding the death of their parents, The Cement Garden: but there again the film is powerful because its situation is strange, but its representation is hauntingly real.

The provocation of Dogtooth doesn't penetrate to a deeper level to make the enforced departure from everyday life justified. The screenplay is patchy, consisting of a series of vignettes that do not build. The conception contains fundamental flaws the audience can only accept if it wants to be provoked. If you see this as science fiction, it lacks the common feature of sci-fi and its major source of satisfaction, that of being thoroughly worked out, a complete alternate universe, implying wide-ranging commentary on the actual world. One of the first things critics mention is the alternative vocabulary the adult children are fed. "Excursion" is taught the children as a word for flooring, "sea" they are told means an armchair, "zombie" is a small yellow flower, "expressway" is a strong wind, "carbine" is a white bird, and so on. The trouble is this vocabulary is rarely seen in action, or given a point. It's just a sketchy way of showing this is a hermetically sealed world. It's not worked out. An opportunity is lost. What rich humor or deep Swiftian (or Orwellian) ironies there might have been. But instead, there are just a few moments of arbitrary absurdity.

The three siblings behave in a childlike manner, living for reward and punishments and engaging in games and challenges that their parents or they themselves invent. (Illogical: if they are wholly dominated by their parents, mainly their father, how come they're allowed to invent activities?) Sex is constantly referred to and a female security guard is brought by the father to have sex with his son. Later the siblings begin licking each other and seem on the verge of having incestuous relations. The sex is as crude and clumsy as in several of Bruno Dumont's films about brutish French country people (though with less appetite), presumably simply because the hapless son has never been taught about sex.

But wait a moment. Do you have to be taught sex? I thought that came naturally. The trouble is, these siblings are abstract constructs. Plain-looking, speaking with a general lack of affect, they have acquired no individuality. There is nothing much to make you remember them or distinguish one from the other. One of the many dubious assumptions is that artificially home-schooled offspring would acquire no separate personalities. They might, presumably, have developed differences that their parents would have repressed; but that isn't shown.

The siblings aren't allowed to leave. Why? It's just a given that the parents play this cruel manipulative game. They're told it's dangerous outside, and they are so infantilized they don't think beyond what they're told. They can only go, the father tells them, when their dogtooth falls out and a new one comes in, which of course will never happen. The concept of a closed system -- something that in the hands of a Jonathan Swift or a Thomas More would generate a whole rich world of ideas about human society and its limitations -- isn't thought through. Nor is the practical matter of how the parents could carry off this crime of enslavement. How can these three grown up siblings have been sealed off from knowledge when they watch videos (they do get hold of some)? The attractive villa where they live, with its large garden and swimming pool, isn't very far from the factory where the father works. The son is strong and athletic, yet it has not occurred to him to jump over the fence around the property. Somehow the idea that house cats pose a deadly threat and they dare not go out for fear of them seems unlikely to convince a robust young male. Lanthimos hasn't conceived of the brainwashing process in enough detail to make it convincing -- or interesting. But we do think, for a bit, about how bad it is to have the truth hidden from you.

Dogtooth moves toward no conclusion, though there is a growing level of violence by the father toward the security guard, and by the siblings toward each other and toward animals. It is kept going mainly by that violence and the shock value of the sex.


Lanthimos' film is not without its peculiar tableaux, like the scene when the two daughters do an odd, later violent, dance, and the brother plays a guitar to celebrate their parents' wedding anniversary. The widescrean format, the expansive scenes of lawn and pool, can be beautiful. Elsewhere, the filmmakers try hard to achieve a yuck factor, when a bit of whimsy and humor might have been more in order. There is no conclusion, not even a set of progressive closing credits. Five minutes of fixed focus on a single set of credits all in Greek at the end of the film is as strange and puzzling as anything in the body of it, and as meaningful. Like the father, who succeeds in playing a Frank Sinatra record and convincing his poor misled kids it's their grandfather singing a message of love for them, Lanthimos is putting us on from start to finish in Dogtooth, and it only works if, like the three siblings, we don't know any better.

[oscar jubis]

This DVD arrived from Netflix about a week ago and I lost it. It is buried somewhere among piles of books, discs, photocopies, gadgets, magazines, etc. in my office and I just cannot find it. I will read your reviews after, eventually, watching the film.

[Chris Knipp]

You could watch it on Instand play on Netflix but if you don't you won't be missing much in my opinion. But for the sake of controversy, you must watch it I guess, as I did.

Michuk loves it, and put it in his top ten. Some critics did too.

[oscar jubis]

Just watched Dogtooth. I have barely begun to think about this film. Not a film one would forget easily. I was surprised how compelling it is to watch. Couldn't take my eyes off it. When I watch a film on DVD, I normally create an intermission to have a coffee and cigarette or use the john or whatever, and then I watch "the second half". I watched Dogtooth straight through. The predominant thought in my mind is the condition of being a parent. You are responsible for bringing a human being into a society that is not entirely to your liking, to put it mildly. There are aspects of the society in which your child will have to live, ways in which the society influences the child, which you find noxious, undesirable. It is not unusual to desire to shield your child from certain things. The patriarch of the family in Dogtooth has fed this protective parental instinct to ghastly extremes. He, seemingly with his wife's consent, has constructed an alternative culture within the walls of his house in the country. The film implies that their three kids, who are now in their 20s, have never been outside. Films with similar premise...I'm thinking primarily of Rolf de Heer's Bad Boy Bubby (1993) Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple (1998)...are more interested in what happens when the thoroughly isolated and uncivilized offspring finally get out and meet the world. They're interested in how modern civilization looks from their entirely unique perspective, or what contact with the outside does to them. All of Dogtooth is like the first 35 minutes of Bad Boy Bubby.The kids are locked up from first frame to last. Within this minimalist tale, what I find most interesting is what the children do with the bits of outside culture they get to experience and their efforts to make sense of it, Hollywood blockbusters on vhs, for instance. What I found most compelling is the power and force of the impetus to explore the outside displayed by the oldest daughter who, the film seems to suggest, was inspired by her first coitus.