Dogtooth (now on home video)

[DOGTOOTH is now available on DVD and Netflix instant streaming. Available on Blu Ray March 29th.]

Review by Bob Ignizio

It's only natural for parents to want to keep their children safe from danger, and to raise them to share our own values. Too much sheltering from the outside world can be unhealthy, though. That's certainly the case in DOGTOOTH (Kynodontas), a strange and disturbing film from Greece that is one of this year's Oscar nominees for “Best Foreign Language Film”.

The patriarch of a well to do family know only as “Father” (Christos Stergioglou) keeps his wife (Michele Valley) and 3 teenage children (Aggeliki Papoulia as “older daughter”, Mary Tsoni as “younger daughter” and Hristos Passalis as “son) secluded from the outside world in a walled and gated estate. These “children” have been educated at home, resulting in some rather strange ideas about the nature of the world. But having known nothing else, they have no reason to believe any differently. That all changes when Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou), a security guard at the father's workplace who earns a few extra dollars on the side by sexually servicing the son, starts bringing outside influences into this hermetically sealed environment.

DOGTOOTH is not the sort of thing one would normally consider a horror film, but I can't really think of a better way to describe it. It slowly builds from merely weird and quirky to increasing degrees of sexual perversion and violence. This is not an easy film to watch, and it isn't supposed to be. It's meant to confront the audience with an extreme vision of what can happen when children are kept from the realities of the world. In an allegorical sense, it can perhaps be seen as a warning about what happens when governments become too paternalistic as well, although I remain on the fence as to whether that was the intent of director/co-writer Giorgos Lanthimos. 

While there are certainly moments of black humor to be found in DOGTOOTH, the blurb on the DVD box declaring it "hilarious" is an assessment not likely to be shared by many. This is a movie akin to the sort of confrontational arthouse films made in the late sixties and early seventies, like THE NIGHT PORTER or WEEKEND. For a more contemporary point of reference, one can find similarities to the work of Lars von Trier, although unlike von Trier, I never got the sense that Lanthimos was pushing buttons just for the sake of pushing them. As strange as the situations presented to us are, the film feels utterly sincere, and the cast play their parts with deadpan believability. The cinematography has an almost documentary feel, showing us this strange insular world dispassionately and without comment.  4 out of 4 stars.