Dogtooth
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Greece 2009
PLOT
A family lives in complete isolation, entirely cut off from society, and under the strict control of a father who keeps his children imprisoned with lies and false beliefs.
This balance will be severely tested when the father begins to bring home Christina, one of his workers, to have her prostitute herself to his son.
CONSIDERATIONS
*Dogtooth* is the debut film of the talented Lanthimos and is an intense, perverse, and harsh drama.
The father, under the delusional pretext of protecting his family, has effectively kept his three children imprisoned in their large villa forever. Even though they have now become adults, their condition is one of slavery: they have no contact with the outside world, are sexually confined in a bubble, and are filled with absurd beliefs that completely alienate them from reality, leading them to live a life of solitude fueled by lies.
Everything is false to them: age, gender, words and their meanings, TV, family relationships, life beliefs, such as the most glaring:
“A child is ready to leave their home, when?” the father asks during dinner.
“When the right canine falls out. Or the left one, it doesn’t matter which. At that moment, the body is ready to face all dangers,” the children reply in unison.
The Greek director views isolation as a failure, a form of lobotomization, the ruin of three people who are deprived of growing up and becoming mentally adult.
The arrival of Christina, to satisfy the son’s sexual instincts, will destabilize the environment, breaking down bigotry and taboos, but also collapsing barriers and provoking the father’s wrath.
Behind the film’s grotesque façade lies a much more intense aspect of perversion: we see the children playing with toy airplanes, having sexual relations with each other, enduring every form of deceit, performing unsettling dances, and simulating guard dogs… all with the firm belief that this is their normality.
Here lies the true horror, within the four domestic walls governed by strict rules, in the father’s mad stares, the alienation of the children, and the silent, complacent acquiescence of the mother.
For the viewer, oblivion remains constant throughout the film, culminating in the beautiful and hallucinatory final epilogue…
Dogtooth is available on Prime Video.
PANDEMONIC MOMENT
When the son encounters a cat in the garden and dismembers it with a large pair of scissors in front of his terrified sisters.
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