Unraveling as a disturbed allegory eluding explanation, a satire of the unstated, a madcap domestic fantasy, Dogtooth is a provocative and peculiar film that pokes fun at the family as a modern, exclusive, deviant microcosm following its own rules and strictures. This modern Greek family, residing in a desolate exurbia of gated properties, is doubtless stranger than those families that come to mind as “typical”. But typical is an appearance, an image or a projection of the family with which Dogtooth begs to differ. If the cinema is the pristine medium of the illusory, then this film is one more illusion approaching what is not illusory—the reality of the family as it could be. It is no doubt illusion, but one too disturbing to be discredited as such. Dogtooth is more real and alive than propriety would admit.
Dogtooth begins with the playing of a tape that functions as a normal vocabulary exercise, stating words and their definitions with example sentences, except that the definitions of these words are incorrect. Language becomes a component of this alternative reality hemming in the conceptual experience of its victims, who are children (even if they are biologically adults). As the character of Father takes home a security guard from the factory at which he works, having blindfolded her, Dogtooth slips at once into strangeness and the alternative rules of this world. Christina, this security guard, is to be the sexual outlet for the Son, whose adolescence, like that of his sisters, is abnormal in the extreme. Controlled by the father and the complaisant, distraught mother, this family is a dystopia, and the terrible consequences the children play out as this new influence, Christina, takes effect like a gust disturbing the piles of paperwork in a messy but sustainable study.
The aesthetic of the film, its many static shots that often crop the heads and torsos of its actors, its slow external rhythms and the deliberateness of its spontaneity—this aesthetic is the greatest component of the film and the expression of its uniqueness. Whatever his conception of the story elements, the visual execution of Yorgos Lanthimos is a pleasure to watch, enhancing the disturbed developments of the story. Without any actuating plot devices—even without the normal guideposts of character motivation and psychology—the film excels at embedding the viewer in the world of its setting, and on its own terms. It wins over many of the skeptical, even as it alienates those that find it too disturbing. Its polarizing uniqueness is the charm of its aesthetic, rather than of its story per se (which, one must admit, is no so creative as to be without precedents, such as The Castle of Purity).
As an amalgam of story elements and its aesthetic, its rhythms and sensibility, its strangely addictive pacing, Dogtooth is a unique film, but not a great one. But while it falls short of excellence, it is a fascinating experience and a captivating vision of a director with more films to create, and more to discover. Let the adventurous and the foolhardy enter here, and discover it for themselves.
