Publication Date 1 April 2010
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Subverted Dark
Narratives
Dogtooth
Yorgos Lanthimos’ provocative film displays one father’s inexplicable subversion of his
children’s world through interrupted story-telling and uncomfortably macabre humour.
In 2008 Austrian businessman, Josef Fritzl, was discovered keeping his long-
lost daughter captive in a hidden basement along with three of her children
fathered by him in one of the most shocking stories of deceit and incest
witnessed in modern society. This, and similar stories of excessive parental
control, have collectively raised outrage about the state of social services, and
questioned the competency and morality of those around us. These gaolers
have operated within society for years, their crimes unbeknownst to colleagues,
families, acquaintances and friends, and the world has soaked these stories
up in horror. Bad taste it may be, but Yorgos Lanthimos’ (b. 1973) Dogtooth
fearlessly delves into these situations of an obsessive paternal need for control
with an avant-garde slant, through stilted mannerisms, a carousel of taboos
and dark, confrontational comedy.
Lanthimos’ narrative is fuzzy, gradually pieced together through a slowly
unfurling series of events, which can feel frustrating in their ambiguity and
seeming isolation from one another. Information is provided, as a sanitised
dystopia emerges behind the walls of one exceptional family home. An om­
niscient father cultivates his own view of an ideal world for his two daughters
and son, aged from late-teens to late-20s, who are painfully sheltered having
never set foot outside the family grounds. The parents create a bizarre parallel
universe for their grown children, who believe the outside world to be a hostile
environment, populated by killer pets, and only accessible for the Father by
car. Aeroplanes flying overhead are toys that can drop out of the sky, the
telephone is a table-top seasoning, a zombie is a small yellow flower, and
the cat is the most dangerous predator of all. The children engage in constant
competitive play, vying over who can bear boiling water for longest and who
can remain submerged in the swimming pool, in return for stickers, which
adorn their bedsteads. Through Lanthimos’ exposition, nothing is explained
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and there are no givens. When the Father’s colleague, the quietly sinister
Christina, is brought into their environs to service the sexual needs of the Son,
the apparent utopia breaks down with indiscriminate acts of violence, sexual
abuse, and the infiltration of the outside world. Lanthimos describes the idea
as an act of science fiction: “What if families, as we know them, were extinct in
the future? What if they couldn’t function anymore, and what if we didn’t really
need them? Then came the idea of this man and his wife going to extremes, just
to protect and preserve their family as they think is the best way. Away from
any kind of exterior influence and harm.”
In contrast to its bizarre material, Dogtooth is very particularly shot, scenes
are framed at obscure angles and the handling is shaky, like one of the Father’s
contrived home movies. Lanthimos felt that: “A very strict framing was fitting
to the story and was accentuating the feeling of entrap­ment and confinement
of the children.” The whole captures the oxymoronic, calculated spontaneity of
the family’s world: “On such a fixed frame, the actors were sometimes allowed
to improvise so that this contradiction could be created in the atmosphere of
the scenes.” Furthermore, the acting is very stilted in a manner that implies the
family have never experienced any “real” emotion because they have never
encountered a “real” situation, with the children speaking in flat monotones
when excited, incredibly non-erotic and awkward sex scenes, and an unnerv­
ingly vacuous response to violence. “The main thing we tried to do is keep
the actors away from what they knew. Have them bare in front of the camera,
without having anything else in their minds other than their action. No
emotional response.” Lanthimos’ ideal contradicts conservatism in an industry
based around visual emotions, another factor that make his story so difficult in
terms of entertainment value, and high on groundbreaking posturing.
In spite of these calculations, there was no one particular agenda in the film’s
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creation: “I try to make my films very open for the viewers to be able to be a very clear path especially through the daughter’s discoveries, whereby the
actively engaged while watching them,” and this ambivalence is highlighted Older Daughter dispassionately directs her younger sibling with, “there feels
through the confusions at the core of the film. A perusal of viewers’ opinions nice”. It is a widely held belief that we are conditioned by puberty, and so Lan-
reveals that audiences do take very clear readings from watching the film, with thimos’ narrative only becomes transgressive by the children’s very isolation,
reactions verging from exultant praise at its boundary-breaking form, to horror the absence of non-relatives on whom to satiate their needs, “the incest was
at the parallels with recent events, and irritation, with some anger at Lanthimos basically just a natural development in the story of this declining family. It was
wasting their time and efforts in sitting through what can be a long and slow inevitable. Sex is a very important factor in life and so it is in this family.” This
experience. Dogtooth is provocative, descending into an incestuous, nightma­ inevitability is turned on its head by the far more dis­turbing idea of random
rish vision towards the end, to such an extent that you have to ask whether this acts of violence that seem to come from nowhere with no logic but a very
shock-value is gratuitous, but Lanthimos is unclear: “The condition in which damning critique on the human condition.
The film encourages a multitude of interpretations:
“The condition in which the film exists is what provokes as a critique of the nuclear family, CCTV society,
people to think. And they think according to themselves, their conventional filmmaking, and the malleability
behaviour, their experiences and their knowledge.” of young personalities: “While the film was never
conceived as an allegory, multiple interpretations
the film exists is what provokes people to think. And they think according to could be applied to it. My personal interest in this story was to observe the
themselves, their behaviour, experiences and knowledge. ” ability to form and minimize the human mind and its perception about the
Another vague concept is the boundary between Dogtooth’s drama and its world.” The unfinished ending continues the work’s ambivalence indefinitely,
humour. From beginning to end the film is inherently dark, macabre to the leading Lanthimos to challenge whether one is “an optimistic or pessimistic
point of absurdity, eliciting uncomfortable laughter. As Christina coaxes the person in this specific period of his life.”
Older Daughter into a submissive sexual relationship, we relish the incongruity Dogtooth has had equal amounts of praise and criticism. It is challenging,
of a grown-up economy based around sparkly headbands and tape measures. confusing, uncomfortable and subversive, but is it pretentious? In a televisual
In light of what they believe to be a savage mauling of their older brother by a and cinematic world of Glee and Alice in Wonderland, where stylisation
cat, the family imitate ferocious dogs on hands and knees with the desperation and choreography are prioritised, Dogtooth stands apart because it offers
of those fighting for their lives. The narrative treads a fine line between laugh- something so different. It is almost challenging the genre of cinema as a form
out-loud, to an embarrassed turning away from the horrors on screen. After of entertainment. Lanthimos has created a pastiche of artist film, reality TV
discovering Christina’s contamination of the family environment the parents and social critique in his stiflingly claustro­phobic environment. The apparent
audition each daughter to step into her role. Her appearance represents the lack of agenda creates an uncomfortable interpretation. Dogtooth is released
parents’ own, two-dimensional view of eroticism and sexual desire, as simply in cinemas on 23 April. It will certainly stay with you long after the credits roll.
an urge of the Son’s to be physically purged on a regular basis.
Dogtooth presents the children’s sexual awakening as inevitable, following Ruby Beesley

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