Dogtooth
2009. 94 Minutes. Unrated.
“I hope your kids have bad influences and develop bad personalities. I wish this with all my heart.”
Would a rose by any other name smell just as sweet? Well, we’re about to find out in the 2009 Greek film Dogtooth directed by Giorgos Lanthimos: the fifth Greek film that has ever been nominated for an Oscar. I should have known when my boyfriend’s brother recommends a movie it could be because it’s awesome, or it could be because it’s really messed up. Dogtooth is a little bit of both.
I’ll start off by saying my boyfriend doesn’t allow me to quote this movie. He’s actually asked me to erase it from memory. That’s how bad it was, and he likes almost all movies…with the exception of the Austrian horror masterpiece, Funny Games where we differ in opinion greatly.
The premise? Three teenage siblings are trapped in a house for their entire lives by their parents who have threatened that cats and the garden plants will kill them if they leave. They begin the day with vocabulary lessons such as zombie means yellow flower and pussy means light. I’m going to leave you to think on that one. These kids believe everything they hear because they don’t know any better. Their only forms of entertainment are watching home videos of themselves, dancing, and listening to a record made by their uncle which really turns out to be a recording of Fly Me to the Moon by Frank Sinatra. They are forced into good behavior or their mother threatens to give birth to more children or a dog. It’s like a messed up version of the children’s classic book Frindle by Andrew Clements, where a class renames the pen a frindle and they all learn a lesson (yes, I went there).
The father (Christos Stergioglou) is the only one allowed to leave the compound to go to work and he occasionally brings home a female co-worker named Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou) to sleep with his son for money. These scenes are in graphic detail and are carved into my brain. Christina, who is the only one given a name during the movie, is persuaded to leave contraband movies for the eldest teen which is where the real comedy happens. The teen begins to recite scenes from these iconic movies randomly during the movie. Everyone gets graphically punished for this and Christina is never allowed to come back.
The father promises that once the teens lose their “dogtooth” (more commonly known as the canine) they are allowed to go into the real world. This is, in my best guess from their dinner conversation, between the ages of 30-40. I couldn’t imagine living with my parents for that long, especially these psychos. Why the parents do this to their children is never discussed; all you really learn about the parents are they like to watch porn, that’s it.
I really wanted to love this movie. It has all the right formula for my taste–dark and symbolic with scenes that stay in your memory long after–but it went overboard in all the wrong places much like the shock gore horror film The Human Centipede. I’d like to equate it to reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula: it’s painful to read but talking about the themes is where it gets interesting. In a time where America might be getting the world’s biggest “firewall”, what is the truth? Isn’t it only made by what we see and are exposed to? What if our parents controlled that? Remember the Santa Claus/Easter Bunny incidents of our childhood? Or much worse, what if the government controlled that? It makes you see the film in a whole different pussy.
