Review by Doug Cooper
Stars Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Aggeliki
Papoulia, Christos Passsalis, Mary Tsoni,
Anna Kalaitzidou, Alexander Voulgaris
Written by Yorgos Lanthimos & Efthimis Filippou
Certification UK 18 | Netherlands 16
Runtime 98 minutes
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Yorgos Lanthimos's subtitled Greek drama depicts the lifestyle of a typical family. The middle aged father goes to work every day while the mother stays at home with the three children - two daughters, one son - all aged in their late teens/early 20s. Every week, the father drives Christina, the young security guard who works at his firm, to their home to have sex with the son. She then gets back in the car with the father to be transported back - all the time blindfolded on the journey so that she has no idea where they are located.
The three children have a very twisted view of life. This is because they have never been allowed outside the walls of their home and have never had any social interaction with other people. Their house is airy and spacious with a swimming pool but the three kids have never set foot outside their home surroundings. They dabble in self mutilation - in one particularly bloody sequence, one of the daughters knocks her own teeth out - and think that cats are dangerous creatures out to harm them while aeroplanes are toys. The mother states that she is going to have a baby but then says if they all continue to behave themselves, the baby will go away.
After Christina secretly gives some porn videos to the youngsters she is banished from the family and the father calmly decides that the elder daughter will have sex with the son. Gradually their madness is fully realised and their closeted world shows cracks.
We've all grown up like this haven't we? No? Oh, just me then.
This whole scenario would seem truly outlandish if the Josef Fritzl scandal hadn't come to light. He was the Austrian who was discovered to have incestuously fathered several children and kept them secretly locked up in his home for years never seeing the light of day. Lanthimos' version of a similarly warped family is horribly convincing, He doesn't cast judgement on them in any way. He observes with clinical skill. The cast perform with the utmost naturalism and you find yourself going along with it all despite the shocking behaviour of the characters. It's uncomfortable and disturbing to be sure but utterly compelling and it retains a powerful hold throughout. Not a fun experience by any means but also one that won't be easy to forget. It makes you worry what your neighbours are up to.
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SECOND OPINION :: Daniel Turner ??? Right. A disclaimer: I'm generally pretty cynical when it comes to overtly 'art-house' flicks. This is because I attended, like, two or three film lectures when I was studying at Uni. Here it was demonstrated how one might use certain techniques to mirror or subvert the central narrative or to to stamp the director's 'unique' visual style all over the film. Techniques such as locked off cameras that don't follow the action. Long periods of quiet. Shots of mundane activity. Quirky, convoluted dialogue. Full frontal nudity and graphic sex. (But not sexy sex. Mechanical, functional boring sex that nobody is enjoying.) And brutal violence. Then I had to pick a film and write an essay on it.
So when these techniques manifest themselves obviosuly and unashamedly in a film, my gut reaction is to dismiss it for trying too hard and just hope that the story is interesting or original enough to get me through the fug. That said, I am also aware that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Anyway.
Dogtooth certainly is a bold film. It has an interesting premise: a domineering patriarch keeps his family - his complicit wife plus their two daughters and a son – completely isolated from the outside world. They are never allowed to leave their high-walled property and the children (who are actually young adults), spend their time playing weird games, learning incorrectly defined words (a 'zombie' is a little, yellow flower) and solving the problems their father leaves for them on cassette tapes. And generally knocking about being odd. Things start to go awry when the father (all of the family are unnamed throughout) brings an outsider, Christina, to this suburban prison to service his sons sexual needs (and needs is definitely the correct word - there's no desire here). As Christina spies an opportunity to use this – shall we say 'unique?' – situation to satisfy her own sexual fantasies, she begins to unsettle the already fragile web of lies and deceit in which the family are entangled.
Despite this genuinely intriguing set-up and its clever reversal of the usual narrative format - i.e something ordinary affecting the extraordinary – Dogtooth just doesn't quite offer enough of a story to make it all worthwhile. We're not supposed to relate to the characters, of course – how could we? – but without the opportunity to feel sympathy or empathy to anyone, the only emotion left is apathy. Is the father really a monster? Are the children really prisoners? Do we want them to break free of this captivity? Meh – who cares? We are nothing but simple voyeurs without any emotional attachment to the peep show – and it is a peep show. The film is peppered with graphic scenes of nudity and sex (not sexy sex, remember), incest and violence which serve really as simple titillation to liven-up Dogtooth's almost stationary pace. You could probably argue the inclusion of such scenes are justified in order to show the seedier aspects of this world he has created. To make the unreal, real. But I think back to those lectures and wonder if it's truly necessary. I doubt it.
But while it's fundamentally flawed, it's not fundamentally terrible. In fact, somehow director Yorgos Lanthimos just does enough to keep the viewer intrigued, if not particularly engaged, until the end. He coaxes some excellent performances from his cast and there are some genuinely tender and real moments of affection between the siblings. The brooding creepiness and authority of the father (Christos Stergioglou) and the timid submission of the mother (Michelle Valley) are perfectly pitched. The visual stlye is bold, bright but minimalistic. And there's humour here, too. The whole thing has a naturally quirky vibe to it, but there are enough gentle in-jokes for the audience to believe that these creatures on screen are human, after all. Cat lovers may disagree, however.
This is a film that will definitely find its way into the collections of film-school students or auteurs of the art-house genre: all those techniques that I mentioned are there will bells on. Does it try too hard? That's a discussion for the pub. Because Dogtooth definitely is a film that you will definitely need to discuss with others after you have seen it. It stays with you and has a tangible aftertaste that only a good chat, a few pints or a bottle of vino will wash away. But it falls short of being a very good film because it doesn't quite have enough story or substance. For all its art-house credibility, it fails the basic test.
• Official Site
• Dogtooth at IMDb