Dogtooth is a strange case. The movie is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos who also directed “Killing of a sacred deer” and “the lobster ”. If you have seen any of those films then you would know what you are in for.
His films are not strange in the traditional way. Where absurd imagery and a dreamlike state are created as you see in a David Lynch film. The only word I can come up with is “stiff”. His actors talk, move, and act very stiffly compared to normal humans. They talk in a monotone voice without much inflection. They move like stilted and with every motion exacerbated, but still with a locked body. The characters also act strange and I don’t mean the acting in the film, I mean the fact that characters act, unlike any human being in the world.
His films feel otherworldly like they take place in a parallel world where norms are different. Yet his films feel mundane, showcasing a lot of everyday activities.
I am a fan of arthouse films, but I haven’t been able to get into his films before. I saw “Killing of a sacred deer” and thought it was absolutely dreadful. I liked the first half of the Lobster, but after they escape the facility the film loses all momentum. Dogtooth was still on my radar since it was one of his first films and instead of being in English, it is in his native tongue of greek. I decided to watch and…… Well, let’s talk about it.
Summary
The movie is about a dad who shelters his 3 children (1 son and 2 daughters) from the rest of the world….. That’s it, the summary ends here. The film is not about how the children muster the courage to escape or how they rebel against his tyrannical rule, no the film is a slice of life showcasing the family’s daily routines and how they live their lives.
Also, I am incapable of spoiling the movie. I could in theory say what happens, but it won’t do much of anything. If I told you that at one point the oldest daughter cuts her brother with a knife, you might think that it is confusing without context. However, the scene is confusing even with context. Most of the film is confusing, for nothing is explained at all.
Analysis
This section is also going to be lackluster since the movie is about small pieces of the family’s life instead of a cohesive narrative.
Everything feels unnatural in this film. As stated before, the way they walk, talk and act are all strange. It is like the uncanny valley of human behavior. It’s close enough yet so different that it feels off-putting. This might create a barrier between the work and the viewer, this is also why I did not care for “Killing of a sacred deer” the first time I saw it.
In Dogtooth, the characters act strange. The first instinct is to blame their circumstances. They have been sheltered all their life. However, at a certain time, the father goes to his job and the characters outside the house also act weird. The tone of his films is consistent if nothing else. I do think it is a mistake to have all characters act unnaturally. By having everyone act weird you create a world where the kids don’t act that different from the rest of the world and I think that is a mistake. I would be more powerful to create a bigger contrast between the house and the rest of the world. That would enhance the theme of sheltering and how it is bad to do, yet I have no other choice than to abandon this point since the contrast is not sufficient enough.
By the way, I call them kids, but they are in their twenties.
The kids also learn the meaning of words and we see they get taught the wrong definition of words.
Examples:
A zombie = little yellow plum
Shotgun = Beautiful Bird
The Phone = salt
It makes sense to not teach them about phones since that is a way to reach the outer world.
The movie starts with the father of the family paying a female security guard named Christina to have sex with his son. What follows can only be described as the most awkward sex scene in all of cinema.
The children are drawn to Christina and on her latter visits, she trades normal things for oral sex with the oldest daughter. Christina is being used for sex yet is using others for sex.
The father is using what can only be described as questionable parenting strategies.
The first thing is that if the children come too close to the border of the house in the form of a giant fence. The son has to drink bleach and keep it in his mouth until the mom says he can spit it out. The parents want the children to stay at home. That much is clear, but why?
Let’s come back to that question later.
At one point a cat has made its way into the garden. The children freak out and the son kills the cat with a manual hedge trimmer. The father sees this as an opportunity, he rips his own cloth and puts fake blood onto his face. He says a cat is the most dangerous animal in the world and to keep it away the children and mom have to be on all four legs and bark like a dog.
Seeing the father coach the children on how to act like a dog has to be another example of the movie’s weirdness. It is a particularly strange image.
The father has a dog who is being trained by some people. The paradox is that he is training his children like dogs to be dogs, but he can’t train an actual dog, the irony is heavy indeed.
Every time a plane is above them in the sky the father throws a toy plane into the yard and says it fell. The children all rush to get it, they push and trip each other to get the fake plane. The plane represents the outside world, by making it into a game and a form of a bird that can fall down, the father creates another illusion to hide the children.
The parents also discipline the children with violence. Both are violent in the traditional sense, but they also use fear as a punishment. We have already talked about how the son is forced to drink bleach. The daughter is hit by the mother after she cuts her brother with a kitchen knife.
It is time to touch open the question of why
Why do the fathers of the family choose to keep them isolated from the rest of the world to such a degree?
At some point, he talks about how the world is a dangerous place. Men are able to handle it when they are between 20-30 years old and for women 30-40.
He clearly has a need for protecting them. He frightens them with the story of the cat being the most dangerous animal. It is clear he has a fear of the world, not so much that the world is going to do something bad to him, but to his children.
We do not get a lot of clues as to why he chooses to do what he does. There is no evidence that the world should be a dangerous place. We are shown very little in the outside world. However, the bits and pieces we are shown do not show any danger at all.
See the movie is doing a very subtle art of satire. Where the message is hidden in plane site.
The movie is commenting on the danger of being too cautious and wanting to protect your children too much.
It takes the idea of the overprotective guardian to an upsert degree. Yet we know of so many parents who are overprotective of their children wanting them to shield them from the rest of the world wanting to solve all their problems, paying others so they can get laid, so they do not have to face rejection on their own.
Many new parents experience a form of anxiety when they get children for the first time. Because the love is so great that the fear of missing them is equally as great, and thus a form of angst is born. So maybe, just maybe the father’s need for keeping the children at home is his twisted way of showing he cares.
The second most important question is why they lick each other so much.
This might now seem important, but the amount of people who lick each other in the film is above average. Sometimes it’s in a sexual context like when the parents lick each other doing sex. Other times it’s more casual like when the daughters lick each other.
Animals lick each other when they clean themselves and others. By having the characters lick each other Yorgos is depicting man as a mere animal like all others. But it also shows how a lack of society is making humans go back to their primitive ways.
homeschooling is dump
I also can’t help but see the whole film as a critique of homeschooling. If you homeschool your child you could in theory teach them all of these things depicted in the movie. You could teach them the wrong meaning of words. The fact that cats are the most dangerous animal and so on.
Is it worth watching?
The final question is simply “is the film worth watching”. and to that my answer is a resounding yes. Not because it is good in the traditional way, or even in an untraditional way, but because no other film is like this.
It’s a strange feeling watching the film and I can’t say I enjoyed watching it. However, I have caught myself thinking about it many times, it has a special feeling and mood. You do not watch it to know what happens, but to peer into a strange world.
Plus the ending is so ambiguous it makes Inception look like nothing.