• Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, 2010.

AN: originally posted on July 6, 2016 to my old blog.

Dogtooth opens with a tape recorder, a woman’s voice teaching a vocabulary lesson. She defines the sea as a leather armchair, “like the one we have in the living room”. A highway is a very strong wind. An excursion is a particularly strong type of flooring. Two girls and a boy sit and listen. When the lesson is over, the younger girl (Mary Tsoni) suggests they all run their fingers under scorching hot water to see who can endure the pain the longest. Instead of finding this idea at all questionable, instead of finding something better to do, the eldest girl (Aggeliki Papoulia) and the son (Hristos Passalis) start establishing the rules for the game. This is how we enter one of the most unsettling movies of recent years.

This film hinges on its performances- we have to see this off-kilter world reflected in its characters. And the actors playing the children all deserve commendations for their work. Everything from their gait to the rhythm of their speech is just wrong enough to discomfit the audience. Their hanging-open mouths and wide eyes act as a stark contrast to their developed, adult bodies; whatever their age may be, they are children. The interactions they have with each other are fascinating in an almost anthropological way, making us feel like we’re looking in on another world. But director Yorgos Lanthimos never lets things get too out of control; his calm, measured direction reminds us that this place he’s letting us see is not that far from reality.

The film often seems like a commentary on the classic image of the nuclear family. The mother and father believe that they are protecting their children from the nasty influences of the outside world. Instead they are destroying them. Like goldfish in a bowl, these children are slowly dying in their environment.

Despite the darkness of its premise, the film is not overly serious. In fact, the film often mines its setting for the darkest kind of humour. At a family dinner, the son bursts out laughing at the idea of using blue eyebrow tint; he says it would be “unnatural”. The mother says that she is pregnant (with a baby and a dog), but she may be able to hold back on giving birth if the children behave themselves. The father claims that a vicious animal known as a “cat” killed the childrens’ other brother. But even while laughing at the ridiculousness of these statements, a sense of horror pervades.

After the father learns that Christina has given his eldest daughter the forbidden VHS tapes, he goes to Christina’s home. Her apartment is full of bright, vibrant colours- yellows, dark oranges, blues. It’s a refreshing contrast to the sandy starkness of the father’s home. He comments on it immediately- “My wife and I thought your house would be like this.” He invokes the family unit, the “wife and I”, to gain the advantage over her. It’s an advantage that she doesn’t seem to care about, but is essential to him. He asks if she lives there alone; she says yes. She mentions her parents, who live on the fourth floor of the building. He thinks about her mother and father, about how badly she has betrayed them by living the life she leads. He unplugs her VCR and beats her with it. Afterwards, he tells her, “I hope your kids have bad influences and develop bad personalities.” He can’t imagine a worse fate than that.

Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for his daughter, the damage is already done. The eldest is already using what she learned from the VHS tapes. “Do that again, bitch, and I’ll rip your guts out. I swear on my daughter’s life you and your clan won’t last long in this neighbourhood,” she says to her brother. It’s not a direct quote from either of the two movies she saw- Jaws and Rocky. This is the eldest using her new vocabulary in her own way. Initially, her parents used language to control her view of the world. Now she uses language to redefine that view.

The climax of the film takes place after the parents celebrate their anniversary. The children put on a show- the girls dance and the boy plays guitar. While the younger girl claims to be tired and quickly bows out of the dance, the eldest keeps going, becoming more frenzied in her movements. Afterwards she devours her dessert ravenously. And then she goes into the bathroom and smashes her mouth with a dumbbell until her dogtooth comes out. Family legend says that when your dogtooth comes out, you are old enough to learn to drive, and when it grows back in, you are old enough to leave. But the eldest is tired of waiting. She makes her escape that same night. At least, she tries- the film ends ambiguously, never revealing if she made it to freedom or not. Even if she did, could she survive in a world where the sea is a body of water, and the highway is a road? Lanthimos leaves it up to us to decide.

In some ways this film is a twisted telling of Adam and Eve. Isolated in a beautiful garden, knowledge sets the eldest daughter free. But Lanthimos never lets things be that straightforward. The world he creates is simultaneously hypnotic in its strangeness and repulsive. This is a film that is hard to forget.