DOGTOOTH (2009)

In this evil Garden of Eden, little yellow zombies grow on the lawn. Planes drop from the sky and transform into small, plastic figurines. And cats, the most dangerous animals of all, sneak into the house at night, wielding hammers with malevolent intent. Everyone in this secluded Arcadia is trapped—none can leave until they have lost their dogtooth.

Father (Christos Stergioglou) and Mother (Michelle Valley) have raised their three children in total isolation: they have never left the confines of the extensive family property. Around the garden are high walls, which prevent a view of the outside world. Once a week, Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou) is driven to the compound while wearing a blindfold and has sex with Son (Christos Passalis) for money. But after she surreptitiously engages Older Daughter (Angeliki Papoulia) for a sexual favour, Father’s great plan to keep the outside world a secret begins to unravel…

Dogtooth / Κυνόδοντας is a slow, unnerving masterpiece. It begins as a languorous nightmare like a snake coiling itself around your neck. Simultaneously a disturbing portrayal of parental abuse and an amusingly absurd depiction of autocratic regimes, Yorgos Lanthimos announced himself as a pre-eminent filmmaker on the world stage. A stunning parable on the human drive for freedom, Dogtooth is an instant classic.

In my review of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), I mentioned how a master filmmaker could summarise all the story’s themes in just the first shot. Though perhaps it was too early in his career to label him a master of his craft, Lanthimos does precisely this: the film’s first image is a close-up of a tape deck, which relays the new words of the day. It is the symbol of the captive children’s indoctrination, with any word suggesting the existence of an outside world gently explained away: “The new words of the day are: ‘Sea,’ ‘Highway,’ ‘Excursion,’ and ‘Shotgun.’ ‘Sea’ is the leather chair with wooden armrests, like the one in the living room.”

The misinformation of a dictatorship is prevalent as a theme from the very opening, though we continue to see new and disturbing ways in which this brainwashing manifests. Dogtooth is a film that demonstrates the power of an idea, of how it can take shape, and mould someone’s mind into a definitive form. Christopher Nolan inventively explored this concept one year later in Inception (2010), but Lanthimos’ portrayal of our faulty neurology is both darker and funnier.

Lanthimos’ humour isn’t for everyone, something that is probably clearer now than it was fifteen years ago. However, his depiction of a parochial emperor trying to keep control of his family is morbidly hilarious. Father does everything he can to ensure his children are dependent on him, but leaks of information occasionally slip through: “Mom, what’s a pussy?” Even the most fastidious of dictators can make mistakes.

Tellingly, Mother replies to Younger Daughter (Mary Tsoni): “Where did you hear this word?” Her inquisitive tone bears the threat of an accusation; it should be impossible for the children to learn new words without their authorial consent. When the children sense the danger of an angry parent, they often lie, though they’re unaware that they can’t be convinced: their entire reality is an artificial construct, their understanding of the world an elaborately designed fiction. Any lie they tell is immediately recognisable.

Unfortunately for the parents, they’re often ensnared in their own fabrication. In fact, an entire culture has formed as a result of their lies. The children believe that their estranged brother lives on the other side of the garden wall, consider the common housecat to be a demonic entity intent on slaughtering the family, and that fish magically appear in the swimming pool.

As a result, the parents are forced to participate in the charade, finding themselves in situations they probably could never have predicted; they must believe the madness of the culture they have created. When Younger Daughter reports that a cat jumped out the window holding a hammer, after having walloped her brother on the knee, she’s not reprimanded but praised for her diligence.

Though Mother is complicit in these crimes against humanity, it’s Father who’s at the centre of the deceit. This man, though utterly insane, seems relatively ordinary. Perhaps this is the most frightening aspect of the film. Josef Fritzl ostensibly was a normal man, yet he kidnapped his daughter and kept her prisoner for 24 years. Ariel Castro was described as being a decent neighbour, though he was guilty of abduction, domestic violence, and crimes that are too horrible even to imagine.

The stark difference between Father and these two psychopaths is that the children are not physically restrained; they can leave the property at any time. The trick lies in how he ensures they stay put. Initially, we only know of one fundamental myth he creates to keep them inside the garden walls: “A child is ready to leave his house when?” Elder Daughter beams: “When the Right Dogtooth falls off!” Father smiles, satisfied: “At that time, the body is ready to face all dangers. To leave the house in safety, one should use the car.”

However, these myths compound: one builds onto another until an entire folklore describing the inhospitable nature of the outside world is established. The cat becomes a typical example of the “external enemy,” a nebulous, insidious force that threatens the stability of an otherwise harmonious realm. It’s a common method of maintaining control within dictatorships, mirroring Orwell’s Snowball in Animal Farm, or Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984. However, it’s rarely a cat.

Lies are used to instil order, but Father induces terror in his children to maintain it. Mother announces she’s pregnant, which promises to destabilise the natural order of the household, depriving the children of their status—unless their behaviour is corrected, that is. Mother assures them: “If your behaviour and your performance improves, I may not have to give birth. But if things don’t change, I will have no other choice.” In a surreal fashion, Mother also describes that, while she may not have to give birth to twins, she will certainly give birth to a dog. The rules are what they make them to be.

Tellingly, everything comes from inside the garden. Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” is a recording of their grandfather crooning to the joys of family life. As Father is planning on retrieving his dog from the pound, it is weaved into the cosmic narrative they’ve taught their children. He intricately creates scenarios where the myth self-perpetuates, such as loosing fish in the family swimming pool so that one of his children can find them. Then, he arrives as a heroic saviour, diving into the water with scuba gear and spear gun to eliminate the danger that’s spontaneously arrived.

As such, Father creates a cult of personality in microcosm. He is a man immensely preoccupied with control, even going so far as to request his son’s concubine wear a specific perfume. He’s an obsessive-compulsive who’s raised an entire family inside his neurosis, determined to keep them safe from all the evils in the world. Of course, he’s painfully unaware that the greatest threat to the children is, in fact, himself.

The effect his lie has on his children is disturbing. They prepare themselves for dinner like military personnel, as though they were attending a public function. All of them fawn over him like eager slaves, desperate to do his bidding and gain his approval, symbolised in the form of tiny stickers that they press onto the headboards of their beds. They cut his toenails, dance for him, and experience painful humiliation if his instructions are disobeyed.

Father has created his own reality, achieving complete and utter authority. Not only over his children, but his wife, too. He instructs her to comb herself better, and tells her how and when to drink her orange juice. He does not love his family—he loves controlling them. He wants to herd them like farm animals on his own personal pastoral, watering them like the plants in his office.

In essence, he wants them to behave much like the trained dog he’s so anxious to have returned to him. The dog trainer’s description of how they mould a dog into precisely what they want describes his treatment of his family: “A dog is like clay. Our job here is to shape it. […] Your dog is waiting for us to teach him how to behave.”

Unfortunately for him, it is clear that such a plan cannot work forever—humanity wasn’t designed to live within such proximity indefinitely. As Elder Daughter slashes Son’s arm with a kitchen knife, or Younger Daughter hits Son’s knee with a hammer, it’s clear that the chickens are coming home to roost.

The entire story seems like a dramatic re-enactment of Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’. As part of a thought experiment, the Greek philosopher asks us to imagine a society of people who have grown up inside a dark cave, chained to a wall. Shadows dance on the rock in front of them, and they come to know these silhouettes as true objects. However, unbeknownst to them, free people are passing by behind them, casting shadows as they walk past a bright fire. This is Christina, whom the daughters look at with total awe.

Trapped in their prison, the extent of the children’s knowledge is limited to that of a shadow, an illusion. In fact, if they were to be shown the truth of the real world, they would reject it immediately, thinking it to be a malicious lie. That Lanthimos was inspired by Plato’s allegory, incorporating this theme of blindness into his story, can be seen as the Mother instructs her offspring in a game: they all wear blindfolds and listen to her commands to achieve salvation, following her voice blindly like abused ducklings.

Eldest Daughter, Son, and Youngest Daughter are rendered as perennial children. This is also evidenced by the fact that they do not even have names: they are defined in relation to their parents, ensuring they will never grow up. It is for this reason we are unsurprised when we watch Son, a grown man, crawl into bed beside Mother and Father—he’s completely dependent on them.

Father bizarrely believes that his methods are required to foster the best possible outcome for his children. In this respect, his philosophy appears to take a page out of Plato’s book once again, mirroring the Greek philosopher’s faith in paternalism. Professor and moral philosopher Gerald Dworkin defines paternalism as: “the interference of a state or an individual with another person, against their will, and defended or motivated by a claim that the person interfered with will be better off or protected from harm.”  

By isolating his children from the rest of the world, he thinks it will keep them safe. But it soon becomes clear that all he’s doing is denying social creatures the space and experience to socialise, as though he had placed them all in Harlow’s Pit of Despair. How he stunts their natural progression into adults also mirrors a language deprivation experiment the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II once conducted on some boys. From infancy, the Emperor provided them with mute wet nurses, curious to see how children who never heard a single word could develop language skills. As it turned out, they could not.

Dogtooth is an epistemological nightmare. The film reveals timely concerns about misinformation and brainwashing in an era of mass falsehoods and corporate media. Simply put, Lanthimos is questioning his audience: how do we come to know things? And how do you know if those methods can be trusted? It’s a preoccupation that bears similarities to René Descartes’ thought experiment involving a devilish deceiver. If his perception of the world that surrounded him was influenced by a malevolent deity, he could be sure of almost nothing. The only thing he could be certain of is that he exists: “I think, therefore I am.”

Older Daughter is the only one who becomes suspicious she is being deceived, that her perception of the world (and her entire life) is based on a monumental lie. It’s an epiphany expedited by the magic of cinema—Rocky IV (1986), of all things—and a new idea germinates. The fact that it is cinema which reveals the truth of her situation is no small matter. At the beginning of the movie, we see how Father uses home videos to create his own culture and craft his own history. Everyone watching has seen the cassettes so many times they can mouth the words, and we witness him making more still, instructing Christina to: “Smile more.”

It’s homemade propaganda. Lenin was infamously obsessed with cinema, recognising the nascent potential it possessed as an indoctrination machine: “Of all the arts, the most important for us is the cinema.” It’s therefore rather ironic that a film brings about Older Daughter’s realisation: it’s cinema that destroys the world of propaganda, shattering the cave wall wide open and revealing the universe that exists outside.

Understanding that they’re little more than puppets in a marionette show, Older Daughter resolves to escape. At first, it is only a wish: “I think my dogtooth is moving…” But when prayers are not answered, she realises she must rely on herself. Intriguingly, though Older Daughter grasps the outside world possesses more than what she has been told, she still abides by the rules of the regime to escape it. This, if nothing else, reveals just how extensive the damage Father’s propaganda model has had on her; the way these children think has been irrevocably altered.

Dogtooth is often considered to be Lanthimos’ debut film, though this is a common misconception. It could be a result of the fact his style is so breathtaking in its originality, and that his direction is so self-assured; it’s easy to assume that it was the startling emergence of a new auteur. He has the unique and unrivalled ability to unnerve by doing very little: in two of his films, a character looking into a mirror becomes a moment of unbearable tension. The simple act of a character slowly shutting a door and dazzling a grown woman with a headband makes us squirm with angst.

That is because Lanthimos understands how to grip audiences. Though the film is frequently slow-moving, he often jolts the audience with a shocking moment that we were not even aware the story was building towards. These are visceral, disorientating scenes—be it a kitchen knife or a dumbbell, our attention is firmly hooked.

When asked why his filmmaking is so particularly horrifying, Michael Haneke stated: “Every film is manipulative, raping the viewer. So the question is: Why do I rape the viewer?” The same question could be asked of Lanthimos’ cinema—why is he so persistent in repulsing his audience? Haneke has claimed he intends to assault his viewer into a state of reflection—could it be the same for Lanthimos? The Greek auteur revealed very early on in his career that he is content to make his audience deeply uncomfortable; in the most distressing of moments, he refuses to turn away.

This is perhaps most apparent in the incest sequence. This moment reveals a fundamental truth that, under despotic regimes, theocratic states, or most cults, women are almost always the first to suffer. First, the threat of incest is only latent, but then we realise with utter disgust it is going to become an institutionalised practice. So then, why does Lanthimos rape the viewer? Perhaps to put us in Older Daughter’s shoes, right as he utterly destroys the ideal of the nuclear family.

The sexuality depicted in Lanthimos’ filmography has always been a disquieting mystery; Dogtooth is the antecedent to the bizarre sexual scenes captured in The Lobster (2015), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Poor Things (2023), and Kinds of Kindness (2024). Passion is rendered dispassionate; sexuality is turned into an alien practice as everyone performs it with a formal rigidity that unnerves.

The incessant licking that everyone demonstrates appears to be the confused manifestation of their stunted sexuality. What would otherwise be tender moments become disturbing in Lanthimos’ Dogtooth. In particular, the coitus between Mother and Father is strangely upsetting. It’s as though even intimacy has a formula, a code of behaviour which must be strictly abided by.

The acting style is a brilliant combination of natural and unnatural, organic movement and contrived stillness. Their mannerisms are all so acutely peculiar that one oscillates between being transfixed by their performances and laughing at the surreal quality of their demeanours. Tsoni and Papoulia especially deserve praise, but the entire cast is spectacular, convincing the viewer that they truly have been caught inside a time capsule.

The cinematography is also commendable, even though the framing often obscures the most interesting part of the scene. It could be argued that Lanthimos and cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis intended to convey the sensation of the children, mirroring the lack of information that is given to them; we have had a blindfold placed on us. Additionally, the static quality of most of the shots symbolises the interminable stasis which the children must endure. Every formal choice and stylistic touch in Dogtooth lends itself to a cohesive depiction of demented tyranny.

And how does one escape such a comprehensive form of oppression? It is perhaps only possible if one possesses the strength and determination to do what is necessary. But even then, we are still not sure if Older Daughter’s escape was entirely successful—and yet, she’s liberated herself all the same.

In the Garden of Eden, man was exiled for breaking the rules. However, in this tale, one woman resolves to escape so that she can break the rules, and she will not wait for fate to smile on her—she will do it herself. Grinning at her blood-stained visage in the mirror, the sheer agony she must be experiencing is nothing compared to the pure bliss of emancipation: she is free at last.

GREECE | 2009 | 97 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | GREEK

Cast & Crew

director: Yorgos Lanthimos.
writers: Yorgos Lanthimos & Efthymis Filippou.
starring: Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Angeliki Papoulia, Christos Passalis, Mary Tsoni & Anna Kalaitzidou.