52 Movies from 52 Countries – #23 Greece

This post is a part of an ongoing project in which I watch one movie from a different country every week.

PLOT: A mother and father (Christos Stergioglou and Michele Valley) attempt to maintain total control over their three children (Angeliki Papoulia, Hristos Passalis and Mary Tsoni) by isolating them on the family’s property. They have raised their offspring (who are now teenagers) to believe that the planes flying overhead are toys, that words like “highway” or “zombie” stand for household objects and that they will die if they ever journey beyond the fence.

MEMORABLE MOMENT:

This is one moment I want to forget. A cat wanders onto the property and the son kills it with a pair of gardening sheers.

The animal lover in me hates him for this. However, this is a young man who has been isolated to the point that he doesn’t know what a cat is. His parents have manipulated their teenage children, telling them that everything from the outside is dangerous. After the animal’s body is disposed of, the father states that the cat is a predator they should all fear.

Later in the film, one of the daughters claims that the cat hit her brother with a hammer. It’s clear that she was the one who attacked him. The father knows this but has to maintain the world he has created by pretending that a cat really could attack someone with a hammer.

WHO IS THIS MOVIE FOR?: This is not a film for the squeamish. Along with the death of the cat there are some very graphic scenes of incest. If this film were made in America I doubt it would even get away with an NC-17 rating.

Dogtooth is also not a film for anyone looking for clear-cut answers. No explanation is ever given as to why the parents decided to imprison their children. They don’t seem particularly religious or express any extreme political views. Unless something was lost in the translation, their motivations are left a mystery. This is simply the way the world is, and that might be a point the director is going for.

So who would like this movie? The short answer is: “Anyone looking for a film unlike anything they have seen before.”

While I wouldn’t go so far as to call Dogtooth a work of surrealism, it is undeniably offbeat. At the same time, I completely believed all the characters. The three leads do an excellent job of convincing us that they are teenagers whose development has been terminally stunted. They fight and squabble like children but have the strength of adults so serious injuries take place. They are also clearly petrified of their parents and the outside world.

The film’s structure is equally unusual. Most movies follow a formula in which the character(s) follow a path lined with increasingly treacherous obstacles. Nearly every Hollywood film from Home Alone to Black Panther uses this template. Dogtooth is more like a conglomeration of scenes strung together. Some of these scenes nudge the characters along to the climax but several are seemingly random “slice of life” moments. The characters’ lives just happen to be sickeningly disturbing, even if they don’t realize it.

According to IMDB

The inspiration for the film came about because the director, Yorgos Lanthimos, was having a debate with some friends who were about to get married. Lanthimos expressed doubts about the institution of family and was struck by the idea of what would happen if a man went to the ultimate extreme of protecting his family.