In a world that is entirely make-believe, a patriarch creates the rules that govern the existence, even the meaning of words, of his children, and no outside influence is tolerated.
Greece
4*
Director:
Yorgos Lanthimos
Screenwriters:
Yorgos Lanthimos
Efthymis Filippou
Director of Photography:
Thimios Bakatatakis
Running time: 95 minutes
Original title:
Κυνόδοντας
Transliterated title:
Kynodontas
They play a tape recorder and listen to the week’s lesson. Words from outside the home, like “sea” and “highway” and “excursion”, are redefined as elements inside the home, and the obvious take-away is that these people will never get to experience real seas, or highways, or even excursions.
The five people in question constitute a family, although the connections between them are so tenuous that we cannot say with certainty that they are related because they do not interact with each other the way family members tend to do. In fact, they do not act the way anyone does and none of them is called by a name. Although they do not live far from the Greek capital of Athens (the one car they have, which only the domineering father is allowed to take to venture outside the house, has the number plate “YY”, for the East Attica regional unit), their house is located on a restricted access road, and no one ever drops by to say hello.
For all intents and purposes, the two parental figures and their three teenage children (one or two of whom might even be in their 20s already) live in a bubble that is highly manipulated by the father, and to some extent by the mother, who introduces new words in a way that distorts the reality outside the home. The lack of natural social interaction has also led the children to speak in a detached manner that makes them sound a little like lifeless robots.
The father, cognisant of his son’s burgeoning needs to express his sexuality, brings home a female security guard from the large firm where he works to have sex with his son. The act itself has no chemistry whatsoever, perhaps because the son’s lack of stimulation has turned him into a mechanical puppet. The son soon learns that his favourite position is doggy style, and many a viewer will speculate whether any allowance has been made for the son to be homosexual. If the term does not exist in the son’s vocabulary, what would he do with such feelings?
The family has a television set, but the outside world does not intrude. They only watch their own home videos, and between the videos, the cassettes and the 1983 Mercedes-Benz (according to online posts) that the father drives, one could easily assume this story takes place in the 1980s — that is, until we see the mother phoning her husband at work and him picking up his small mobile phone. It is also easy to think that the parents are conservative individuals who are scared that their children would be exposed to salacious influences, but they watch porn together in the living room when their offspring are asleep.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos presents his material with sharply lit images and very often shows his characters with their heads cut off by the frame to convey the idea of an idyllic atmosphere that leads to mindlessness. The robotic voices and the simple white clothes that the children wear also suggest a complete lack of creativity and a bond of unity and uniformity that is hard to miss. The father, who is the only one ever to leave to house, even goes as far as to remove the labels from the food and water he buys, lest they indicate life beyond the walls of his property.
And yet, there are subtle hints that things are not as peachy as the father would like to believe. The middle child (the elder daughter) bears a scar of unknown provenance on her shoulder, and all the children sometimes speak to the fence or throw a slice of cake to the other side. We later learn that they used to have a brother, who has escaped to the other side, but his existence only comes up in a single scene whose focus is very much elsewhere.
This film is clearly about control, and about the abuse that parents sometimes inflict on their children in order to “protect” them from undue influence. It is a fascist approach, to be sure, and the film ends on a very tragic note that should not come as a surprise to anyone who recognises that anyone who has tasted freedom will demand more of it. Throughout the story, the family dog is being trained to listen to his master’s orders, but the dog appears to be just one yelp shy of Labrador kindness, and the question hangs in the air whether control and training would ever be able to supersede innate behaviour.
Dogtooth is a powerful indictment of parents who impose their own vision of the world on their children and subsequently distort reality so that they may feel like they are in control. Lanthimos’s approach is both shocking and slightly comical, and we cannot look away.
(The title refers to the father’s statement that only when the children’s dogteeth, or eyeteeth, have come out, their bodies will be ready to “face the dangers that lurk outside”.)