Thoughts from the committee
Now a major name in cinema thanks to Academy-Award-winning films like The Favourite and Poor Things, it was Dogtooth that put Yorgos Lanthimos on the map. Made in his native Greece, Dogtooth contains some of the key hallmarks of Lanthimos’ unique style, such as characters living under bizarre and restrictive rules, whether real, enforced or self-enforced.
Three adult siblings live with their family in a luxurious home, yet know nothing of the outside world. The estate seems to be entirely self-sufficient, and yet the trio are completely dependent. Their parents dictate everything: what words mean, what objects are called, even what they should fear. At first it plays like a dry, unsettling comedy. Then it keeps going, and the laughter stops.
Lanthimos shoots with icy restraint, letting the absurdity build in plain sight. The performances are stiff, almost robotic, as if the characters themselves have been programmed incorrectly. It’s funny, yes – sometimes ‘funny ha ha’, but frequently ‘funny weird’.
But Dogtooth is not strange or disturbing for its own sake: its themes of power, control and manipulation, whether in the family or at a larger political scale, are evergreen and ripe for further investigation.Throughout his career, from The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer or in last year’s Bugonia, Lanthimos has continued to explore this theme of legacy: what sins we pass down through the generations.
“The film’s provocative conceit and the cold-blooded precision of its violence recall Michael Haneke, particularly Funny Games and Time Of The Wolf, but Lanthimos has a prankish sense of humor, and favors an offhand absurdity that aligns him closer to Luis Buñuel.” – Scott Tobias, The AV Club