Dogtooth (re-release)
Take a look in advance
Somewhere in the Greek countryside, a wealthy middle-aged businessman and pater familias has a beautiful house on a large lot with a beautiful swimming pool. He has a quiet, submissive wife and three handsome children in their twenties: two daughters and a son. So far, everything seems fine, but this turns out to be cosmetic. Something is very wrong. The children, as becomes chillingly clear, are infantilized; they are held captive in a state of perpetual infancy by their controlling and manipulative father and passive mother.
They have never been allowed to leave the family compound, and they are trained like dogs in obedience, barking and jumping on all fours. Their upbringing is a parody of homeschooling. Their parents deliberately teach them the wrong meaning of words. It is grotesque anti-teaching.
For h...
Somewhere in the Greek countryside, a wealthy middle-aged businessman and pater familias has a beautiful house on a large lot with a beautiful swimming pool. He has a quiet, submissive wife and three handsome children in their twenties: two daughters and a son. So far, everything seems fine, but this turns out to be cosmetic. Something is very wrong. The children, as becomes chillingly clear, are infantilized; they are held captive in a state of perpetual infancy by their controlling and manipulative father and passive mother.
They have never been allowed to leave the family compound, and they are trained like dogs in obedience, barking and jumping on all fours. Their upbringing is a parody of homeschooling. Their parents deliberately teach them the wrong meaning of words. It is grotesque anti-teaching.
For sexual instruction, the father pays an employee of his factory, Christina, to come to the house blindfolded and serve the son sexually. This arrangement is furiously terminated when it turns out that Christina and the daughters get along better sexually. The father decides that it would be better to continue the arrangement on his own. This situation cannot go on forever and one of the daughters starts trying to escape.
Dogtooth was the breakthrough of director Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness) won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, among other awards, and received much praise and attention from critics. It was called a brilliant Greek black comedy, a strange fable of dysfunction and a veritable operetta of self-harm.
Lanthimos' film was frequently compared to Michael Haneke's films in the press, something Lanthimos hated because, according to him, his films have humor, a necessary ingredient, and Haneke's do not.