My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 14): Dogtooth
Dogtooth (2009)
Written and Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Dogtooth is one of those
excruciating films that enters a dysfunctional world so vividly that you need
to pause it at times just to recover from its excesses. Like the best science
fiction, it starts with an extreme conceit and follows through on it to the
logical, if uncomfortable extremes. The idea here is that a middle-aged upper-class
Greek couple is so determined to protect their children from society’s evil,
corrupting influence that they lock them within their palatial estate and deny
them all contact with society. No live TV, radios, cellphones, internet, newspapers,
nothing. A single phone is locked in the closet only for use by the parents.
The three 20-something kids never leave the expansive estate, and have no
friends. The parents have a rich collection of carefully censored books, so
home-school the kids, who seem well educated if very limited in their ability
to express emotion or interact appropriately (rather zombie like in speech). Labels
are removed from water bottles and food products before they enter the home so
the kids cannot learn any corrupting influences from them. Perhaps acceding to
the need for at least the male child to express sexuality, the father (a factor
owner) pays his female security guard to
come, blindfolded, to the home every couple weeks to teach sexuality to the young
man. This sex-tutor-prostitute is rigidly prohibited from telling him anything
about the outside world (the father listens in on their sessions, and on the
whole house, with a microphone system). Airplanes flying overhead is the siblings’
only real connection with an outside world, and the parents deceive the
children about this as well, saying they are toys, and providing airplane
models for the children to play with. So disciplined is this
corporal-punishment mini-society is that, when the son throws an airplane toy
over the wall, the father drives his car out to get it, while the children do
not step over the line between their estate and the outside world, afraid to
exit the estate.
Of course, not all goes well. An older son has “died”,
and in a strange twist, the cat-hating father convinces the kids that cats are
the world’s most vicious creatures and killed their brother—leading to a nasty group
cat-killing with hedge clippers when a kitty wanders onto the estate. The
sex-coach brings videotapes with her to the house, leading the children to ask their
parents what “motherfucker” means. The parents respond as they always do when
uncomfortable vocabulary sneaks through their moral quarantine, by making up a
definition. So, a motherfucker is defined as a type of small frog, and a zombie
is a little yellow flower. Since no dictionaries or internet is available, the
children are passively dependent on their parents for all information and (possibly)
accept this. After dinner all gather to listen to “grandfather” (Frank Sinatra)
sing, and as the song progresses the father helpfully translates “Fly Me to the
Moon” as a paean to family values and love for parents. The movie gets darker
and darker after the sex-coach is fired (and beaten up) for bringing the
outside world in for the curious kids. Now no outsiders can be admitted, so the
older sister has to stand in as her brother’s sex partner. What the parents do
not know is that the two daughters are covertly licking one another, previously
taught this skill by the outsider. Finally, the older sister tries to escape in
the trunk of her father’s car as he goes to work, but the outcome is not so
good, as he stops to do an errand with the car idling---the camera’s focus on
the closed trunk and lack of sound within suggests the outcome.
Like many such films, things do not always stand up to
rigorous analysis, in particular how the kids could be so well educated and
literate, yet completely clueless about the real world outside. But the
rigorous control of director Lanthimos and the incredible screenplay make us
believe in this mini-dystopian world like few movies or books I have seen. We
are desperate for these kids to escape, yet despondent when they do not seem to
want to do so, or when they accede to degrading acts purely on the whim of
their sadistic father (a wonderfully contained sociopathic performance by Christos
Stergioglou). The film achieves a convincing, surreal mix of a Mormon
home evening, child-abuse-porn, and zombie-affect (real zombies, not little yellow
flowers). Is it a metaphor on hyper-controlled child rearing of our era? I think so, and the limited, emotionally
stunted result shown here is a warning sign for parents who refuse to allow
their kids to be exposed to bad things or who try to create some sort of
controlled, perfect home paradise. Dogtooth joins Lars von Trier’s Antichrist
(2009) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) as my top gut-punch creepy movies
of the century thus far.
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