User Reviews

Dogtooth is a Greek art-house movie.

Dad has brought his 3 children (2 daughters and a son) to adulthood by sheltering them from the outside world in a walled compound. Fair enough - an interesting idea to play with. This has involved teaching them wrong words for everyday things and also ideas like if they stray outside the compound they will be eaten by man's greatest enemies, cats. Huh? Disbelief becomes considerably more difficult to suspend at this point.

Dad brings in a woman from outside to provide son with sexual release, and she turns out to be the catalyst to introduce outside influences which ultimately fracture the strange but otherwise operational "family" unit.

There is some strong meat here - sudden and quite shocking moments of violence, a fair amount of nudity and some moderately explicit sexual material. This sits within the odd story referred to above, some mannered acting and direction, and an irritating non-resolution.

The film is not without merit: neither is it wholly successful, however. And, to be sure, it is entirely an acquired taste.

Dogtooth is not a comedy. The absurd situations in this film became humorous several times but I always choked on my laughter as the subject matter was too serious to be funny. The film is about three young adults who live with their parents in a large but isolated walled compound; the two young women and the young man have no knowledge of the world outside of this place and not much of the world inside of it. In fact the parents deliberately mislead them with nonsense on nearly every topic, for instance they claim that men are commonly killed by cats. Additionally, the siblings are taught the wrong words for certain objects and concepts, thus a "salt shaker" becomes a "telephone." These young people have been given a mostly carefree extended childhood at the cost of ever having any autonomy or knowledge. The parents' theory seems to be that the world is a terrible place and contact with it is more damaging than an isolated life. This Eden-like setting is a blessing and a curse: the characters are free of most problems that face normal people; they have no real responsibility and thus no worry. Still, like any human they yearn for answers and they have a certain half formed desire to be the masters of their own destinies. Further, in what seems to be a recent development the children are seeking an outlet for their sexual needs; while the parents can prevent them from being exposed to any stimulus they cannot stop biological urges from surfacing. Any solution to this problem is bound to upset the already fragile artificial world in which they live.

The implications of this film can be applied to any number of societal relationships. The connection these siblings have with their parents is quite similar to the affiliation between a citizen and his government or a believer and his religious institution. The film implies that for any of these relationships to work the individual must forego intelligence and blindly follow the institution although this sort of obedience is contrary to human nature. At the same time, the few people in charge must play their part perfectly in order to keep the trust they've been given; this proves just as difficult for the leaders as the followers, here for example when the parents allow themselves things forbidden to the children and inevitably draw unwanted attention.

Dogtooth is a film that raises all sorts of questions about the individual and the society he is forced to play a part in and it encapsulates these questions into a deceptively simple plot. Wisely, rather than answer these questions the film leaves these questions to be pondered by the viewer even as it neatly reduces the entire question to the absurd.

Living in the big house with a swimming pool in some unknown remote place, this family is shut off from the world outside. They are not only surrounded by the big plants in the garden but also the big, tall fence blocking their view. The family is affluent, and the house is mostly clean, and they do not see any problem with being stuck in this isolated place. They do not watch TV or read newspaper(but they have some books), and only signs of the civilization outside are the planes which fly across the sky above from time to time.

How do they come to have such a bizarre lifestyle? The movie never explains the motive, but it seems that the father initiated this lifestyle probably a long time ago. He is the only one who can go outside with his car(he seems to be the manager of a big plant), so it is his job to supply anything his family needs in their life. He seldom talks about his family in front of other people(he just says that his wife is too ill to meet people), and he blocks anything that may interfere the family life. When he buys foods and water, he painstakingly removes the labels for not giving any outside information. How thoughtful he is.

His wife obeys to him as a good wife(she is physically not ill at all, by the way), and so do their children. They have two daughters and one son. Though they are in late adolescent years, they behave as if they were still little children under the protection of mommy and daddy. They have several strange games to spend their daytime, like "a game of endurance": they test themselves who can stand longer when they dip their fingers in hot water. In case of their other private game, they anesthetize themselves with chloroform to find out who will wake up first.

They have been leading a good life at least in their view, but it is gradually revealed that something unstoppable is being emerged while their abnormal behaviors, including barking like a dog on their knees when they believe they are threatened by a cat, continue. Though he cannot block everything, the father is determined to stop that by any means necessary, and there are several bursts of violence to shock you mainly due to the clinical, objective attitude of the film.

The film, which won Un Certain Regard Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010 and was nominated for Foreign Language Film Oscar early in this year, has a lot of cold, distant feelings, but it is also interesting and, sometimes, amusing to watch. The director Giorgos Lanthimos, who wrote the screenplay with Efthymis Filippou, keeps everything straight throughout his film with the wry, subtle sense of black humor. The aforementioned twisted vocabulary is used several times in a funny way, and there is also an outrageous scene depicting the way the children celebrate the anniversary of their parent's wedding. The actors in the film play as seriously as possible to make the twisted reality of their characters mundane – even when they cross the boundary of our ethics out of necessity, they never look self-conscious while supporting the detached tone of the film.

Maybe because of the death of Kim Jong-il two weeks ago and the following response of North Korean people shown on the media, these bizarre human behaviors in the film are not that weird to me as I remembered. I and other South Koreans know too well about how twisted North Korean society have been while shutting up itself from the world and brainwashing its people with the crooked ideas just like the family in the film. One savage scene in the movie reminds me of how severely North Korean people are punished if they are found watching South Korean TV shows.

I remember well when Kim Il-Sung, the former dictator and the father of Kim Jong-il, was dead in 1994. Even we South Koreans were flabbergasted to some degree to see the hysterical mass mourning even though we had been well aware of that he had been literally worshipped as the big daddy of North Korea. Now his son is dead, and his grandson becomes a new leader to be worshipped without much trouble, and we do not find the recent behaviors of North Koreans under this wacky dictatorship particularly weird, mainly because we have seen this before. Compared to this insanity, "Dogtooth" is like a mild fairy tale.

By the way, what is the point of the movie? It does not express its opinion while firmly holding its austere attitude, but I think the lesson from the film is that the kids are bound to grow up no matter how much the parents try to restrict them with their stringent home schooling. Maybe it works for a while, but it cannot last forever. No wonder some North Korean people escape from their country in spite of the constant brainwashing and the possibility of severe punishment.

I think the movie pretty much gives the solution for the ending.the girl has tried to escape but within the family rules.it is not important if she will escape because i do not think she knows what escape really means.she does not have the tools to make it to the outside world anyway.it is quite impossible to understand how she functions,and which rules are governing her actions.i think that the end just shows that her world is as empty and dark as the back of the car where she is.it is our own need to translate the movie into our world that we think of escape.it is of no importance if she 'makes it'or not.and that is the concept of the movie.but i also think that the director does not show her going out (whether she can or cannot) because that would mean a sense of freedom,and the movie's concept is totally against that kind of notion.

This movie is about our society and our behavioral patterns as a species.

It's about what IS happening. Think about it. Τhat is why we don't know where or when everything is happening. This film demonstrates a universal problem. People might think that it is a mockery of western society or capitalism. I don't believe that to be true. It's the same weather you live in the middle east or in Europe. Whether you have cappitalism or communism. It's not specified politically. Because in the end it doesn't matter. It is about our lives and how we choose to lead them. We ARE trapped. We are being told LIES every day from our parents, who want the best for us, but they don't know any better. But they were raised the same way they are raising us. It's a circle. And from our governments as well. But we can't break free, because that's all we know. We still choose to participate in such a society. That is the absurd. And that is why this movie is surreal or supposedly weird and raw.

But what about reality shows? Or splatters? Or Rambo? Or Die Hard? Aren't they absurd? Yes. Do we watch them? Yes. Because they're not about us. That's why so many people hated this movie, or didn't want to understand it.

We are trained to watch absurd things and yet, when it comes to mirror our society or our lives, we turn away from it.

Please watch it. It's brilliant!

This is an odd film. To start with, we are confused as to what is going on. However, after a while, it all becomes fairly clear: Papa and Mama have, in "The Village" style, been 'protecting' their offspring from the outside world, by telling them that they cannot leave their house until their "dogtooth" has fallen out and grown back again (ie never, since there is no such tooth). If they leave they will immediately be devoured by man's biggest enemy, cats. Far-fetched? You'd think so, but a look at the news over the past couple of years - the Fritzl case, the "Sheffield" Fritzl, the Mongelli case in Turin - and this film could not have come out at a better time for director Lanthimos.

What about the film? Is it any good? Well, the concept is excellent and very relevant, we have established that. The acting at times is a bit weird and stilted but then you realise why they talk in this strange way. The occasional moments of violence are brilliantly filmed, so much so that you feel that the daughter, to refer to one scene, is really being hit hard over the head. The framing seems a bit odd - some out-of-focus shots, lots of missing heads, makes it seem a bit amateurish. In fact, at times it is almost as though Lanthimos is trying to make a Greek Dogme 95 film. This is a minor gripe though, and on the whole I enjoyed this film (as did many people in the well-attended Greenwich Picturehouse in South London last night). And, bizarrely, occasionally very very funny. The ending won't be to everybody's taste but, on the train afterwards, I struggled to think of a better ending. All in all, the film has awakened my appetite to Lanthimos's work and I will certainly try to seek out his two previous films, "Kinetta" and "O kalyteros mou filos".

I see that "Dogtooth" has been sent to the Academy as Greece's representative for next year's Oscars. Well, I can't see it winning, but I certainly can see it making the final five. I keep my fingers crossed.

Terrible just terrible.a crazy father has isolated his family and cares about dogs more than his children. The brother fu.cks his teacher and after she was fired by the mad father he starts to fu.ck his sisiter?WTF! Then we have this girl and her attempt to escape which finally become a success and that terrible and meaningless ending!she hid in the truck and then what?should we wander about what will she do next?wow what a phiosophy movie. Don't waste a second on this go watch another movie

Cinema works two ways in Greece. Theo Angelopoulos is the prestige cinema we export to Cannes or Venice every couple of years, but it's not what we watch as a peoples. The multiplex is crowded with the Hollywood milieu, and the national product we consume either strains for respectability and po-faced seriousness (El Greco, Psihi Vathia) or is plumb stupid in the face of it (Soula Ela Ksana). The irony of Dogtooth then is that it will become the toast of the town for a few months not because we recognize something of importance in it but because the Oscars did. In a strange coup, tinsel town glitz and glamour seems to validate radical art.

Already TV talk shows that wouldn't have anything to do with cinema outside the latest Brangelina gossip are playing the trailer as panelists exchange in a serious manner banalities about this fierce new voice of Greek cinema. The welcome aspect of this is that Dogtooth will be exposed and confront an audience which otherwise would shy away from that confrontation. The moral guardians of society, here and abroad, will once again no doubt grasp the opportunity to condemn or be selfrighteous or pass judgement, the film gives them the podium. Dogtooth addresses them, preemptively addresses their reaction, and it addresses us.

Greece was lucky (or unlucky for some) to barely escape the iron grip of communism, not without a price paid fully in blood, but we didn't escape the grip of a totalitarian state. It's a bit of a stretch to attempt the claim that, in the wake of the military junta of '68, Greek society is divided between those who can afford to drive Mercedez Benz and those who can't, but the exaggeration is rooted in the reality of a class divided society. Nikos Nikolaidis, cult legend of Greek cinema, gave us sorrowful portraits of the down and out, the outcasts and the misfits, Dogtooth invites us behind the mansion walls of the rich.

In Singapore Sling, Nikos Nikolaidis created in microcosm a world where, having satisfied their apparent problems, decadent individuals turned to satisfy their basest instincts, violence and perverse eroticism. Dogtooth takes the comment further, where no more concessions need to be made, is violence all that bubbles at the core of our being or is violence only the symptom of a corrupt being? Is violence our human nature, or is it our inhuman nature, unnatural to us.

I like how the film posits that argument. What is an utopia to the characters, is a dystopia ot the viewer. The first instance of that dystopia is the violence of language, equally emblematic of Maoist propaganda and Orwellian narrative. Not by objects external to us, but how we relate to them. If we begin to replace the ugly for the beautiful, "zombie" for "flower", then a point down the line comes where what stands for an open world must be replaced by the mundane or the casual, "sea" for "armchair". "Zombie" and "sea" pose equal threat to the authority of the parents. In this sense, to speak clearly is to know the true nature of things, and the opposite.

Where the film stands on its own for me is the unpleasantness, do I recognize in it an important metaphor worth enduring it or am I titilated to sit the duration. I do, not only because I can recognize the tragedy of a human being who doesn't know any better than to perform cunnilingus in exchange for a trivial object, but also because I am moved by the genuine horror of the son who disembowels the harmless cat he considers a grave threat to the peace of his dystopia. The violence of the parents begets more violence, and more, without the moral compass of being able to think for oneself, right and wrong disappear.

Dogtooth tells us that oppression that happens with the best intentions is still oppression, that to seek to protect from outside corruptive influence is in itself an outside corruptive influence. The soul needs to be formed from within at some point. Who makes laws for the lawmakers, who polices the police, it's the same argument for me.

The end is poignant in that sense.

The daughter makes her first steps out on the world but she's dead, literally inside the trunk, or figuratively dead to the world. What's there to be reborn to? Can a future be surmised for her outside of that trunk when she doesn't know any better than to be sexually intimate with someone for a trivial object? Her values, outlook, perspective, have been shaped for her, the movie shows us the cost extracted. Dogtooth's power then is not only the sketch of social allegory but also the means to it. The surreal makes sense to us.

It's also one of the darkest comedies I've seen in a long while. The usual wooden delivery of the actors in a Greek movie, is turned to an asset here. And I like how the daughter's liberation, or the onset of it, from her parents, happens in the form of a manic dance, in a final performance that celebrates the breaking loose from the confines of a prison of the soul.

What if you could be the master of your own universe, able to make everything to your own specifications and liking? And what if, in that universe, you could have absolute control over your subjects, so that, not only would they have to do what you told them to, but you could even go so far as to shape the very way they look at the world?

The unnamed middle-aged protagonist (Christos Stergioglou) of "Dogtooth" has created just such a kingdom for himself and his wife (Michelle Valley), tucked away in a rural area of Greece, where the two of them have raised their children - a boy (Christos Passalis) and two girls (Aggelika Papoulia, Mary Tsoni) who are all now in their late teens - in such complete isolation that the kids have virtually no knowledge of the world that lies beyond the fenced-in little compound in which they live. They know only that it is a dangerous and scary place and that none of them will be able to venture out into it until their dogtooth falls out - which is to say never. They are so misinformed as to how the real world actually works that they think planes are just tiny objects moving through the air, and that if one of those tiny objects were to fall out of the sky and into their yard, the children would be able to pick it up and play with it like a toy. They've also been taught by their colluding parents to believe that prowling cats are a mortal menace to be destroyed on sight. The kids spend much of the day doing repetitive chores, playing meaningless games and being taught an incorrect vocabulary (they use the word "phone" when they really mean "salt," for example). The father regularly pays a young woman (Anna Kalaitzidu) he works with - the only person from the outside world the children are allowed to meet - to come and have sex with his post-pubescent son, and severely beats the kids every time they step out of line.

A stunning allegory about the evils of totalitarianism, "Dogtooth" is somewhat reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village" in its basic premise and setup, only here the guiding principle seems to be less about protecting the young ones from the harsh realities of a modern world and more about this one man's finding a way to achieve a kind of apotheosis for himself - making himself a god in the eyes of his children. For not only does he make them reliant on him for all the basic necessities of life, but he's made it so that they accept without question the "truths" of the physical and moral order he's established for them to live by.

The man and his wife have together inverted and perverted the very definition of parenthood. Rather than grooming their children for an adult life in the real world, these parents deliberately infantilize their offspring, making it virtually impossible for them to leave the home and start a life of their own. This ensures that the kids will be there to take care of them for the rest of their lives.

On a broader scale, the movie is a searing indictment of the power of propaganda, showing how easy it is to mislead people and to compel them to do what one wants simply by feeding them false information and, thus, skewing their view of realty and the truth. And isn't this how totalitarian dictatorships are born and sustained? But there's also an innate desire for liberty and independence lurking in the recesses of every human soul that must finally assert itself in a desperate run for freedom, and the movie addresses that reality as well.

The movie is both raw and provocative as it takes on some rather touchy sexual themes - mainly involving incest - that some in the audience may find disturbing and discomfiting to put it mildly. There's also a fair amount of full-frontal nudity, brutal violence and more-than-simulated sex scenes in the movie.

Yorgos Lanthimos' direction is spare and stripped-down, as befits a parable, with off-kilter visual framing that heightens the bizarre nature of the piece.

"Dogtooth" is unnerving, thought-provoking and provocative - and a must-see for the unconventional, adventurous movie-watcher.