Dogtooth (2009)

The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos has become essential within the art cinema, his films are characterized by exploring obsessions such as alienation and disorientation produced by a gap between language and reality, the robotic repetition of social conventions , dystopia, and the use of catharsis as an escape route.

There is no better way to understand his message than going back to the movie that captivated the attention of the audience and elevated him as one of the most interesting directors of the moment. “Dogtooth” (2009) is a dysfunctional family drama released as a black comedy in the style of Luis Buñuel, mixed with horror and a technical skill that is stunning and astonishing. Here, Lanthimos concentrates on a seemingly normal Greek family living on a remote rural estate. However, things are not alright.

In the opening sequence we find three teenagers without names (played by Angeliki Papoulia, Hristos Passalis, Mary Tsoni) nervously looking at each other in the bathroom while a tape recorder plays the voice of a man (Christos Stergioglou) who classifies words in a wrong way. “A highway is a very strong wind,” the speaker intones, and “a shotgun is a beautiful white bird.”

The linguistically confusing definitions do not make sense until it is evident that these linguistic concepts tell the children how to act and understand things. The parents have decided to teach their children wrong concepts of the world and keep them trapped inside their huge and comfortable house- they have never had contact with the outside world. The atypical norms of the father are governed within the house and must be fulfilled and obeyed. Since they were little, the three teenagers have been educated by these bizarre linguistic dogmas that set the tone for their growth and development.

Without specifying any reason or antecedent for this irrational behavior of the parents, Lanthimos focuses on portraying the behavior and evolution of characters that are molded under “abnormal” laws, centered in this family that can give a clear perception and understanding of the operating system of the human society reigning outside the high walls of the house. And this is when we can ask ourselves- what would happen if this happened in real life, and also in a massive, meaning political way?

And what can drive a father to decide to isolate his family, to even agree with incest before someone foreign enters their lives? Is the world in which we live so horrible? The patriarch decides the future of his children, training them as if they were dogs, forcing them to behave, after all, like animals in search of their reward. Reward that only he can give, which makes him essential and superior to all. Thus, the children are like robots (they even speak and act as such), who obey without questioning anything.

Lanthimos refuses to contextualize his material, instead of discovering revelations, he places the responsibility on the spectator to gather the pieces of this fascinating and disturbing social criticism. What the final product exposes is a reality deformed by an uninhibited parental megalomania, where the children exist in a twisted world invented by their monstrous guardians.

A must-view for anyone who has philosophical concerns about the functioning of the family nucleus, ‘Dogtooth’ represents the alternative future of our species. Let’s not let it become the real one.

by Octavio Carbajal González