Disturbing, perverted, weird...greek
Directed by Giorgios Lanthimos, 2010
Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (which ended up going to Denmark's In A Better World), Dogtooth is quite a surprising pick. It deals with an authoritarian father whose son and two daughters have never left the premises of his countryside compound (which looks very much like Mon Oncle's Villa Arpel). He has kept them from doing so by telling them that stepping outside of the fence would result in immediate death. At least until the child is mature enough to venture out on its own, a state that comes with the loss of a dogtooth. The relationship between the father and his children, who have all reached an adult age yet act like infants for lack of socialisation, is so perverted that comparisons to the Fritzl case of Amstetten are far from absurd. When arrested, Fritzl claimed he wanted to shelter his children (and incestuous grandchildren) from the rotten outside world - words similar to those used by the father in Dogtooth. While the setting is far from likely, the film does raise the question to what extent parents may choose to circumwent the societal system and 'home school' (I use inverted commas so as not to discredit home schooling itself, which can work much better than compulsory school attendance). The repugant events taking place on the screen are contrasted by Lanthimos' sober camera work and the complete lack of music, making them all the more unsettling. Dogtooth will either make you guffaw or, if you accept its framework, leave you speechless - which was my reaction. Cinephiles will have noticed the remseblance of the photo above to a famous scene from The Shining - a film in which a father isolates his family from the outside world and goes apeshit.
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