As the parent of a teenager in these times, I have to admit I feel a great deal of anxiety every single day. School shootings have become so common they hardly make the news anymore. Our state ranks 50th in education, yet our State Superintendent would rather force our schools to put Bibles in every classroom and have an extra moment of silence for Charlie Kirk (they are already mandated to have a moment of silence every morning) rather than actually do something, do anything, to actually help our students get a better education. Our national government is stripping our rights on a daily basis. All of this is on top of all the normal stresses teenagers have, like fitting in, finding romance, etc. I want to just wrap my arms around my daughter and keep her home. Keep her away from all this daily horror. Keep her safe.
Buy Dogtooth 4K UHDI’m not alone in that feeling. I suppose most parents throughout time have struggled with letting their kids go, allowing them to venture into the world where danger lurks. According to one of the extras in this new 4K UHD release of Dogtooth, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos conceived of this film when he saw how concerned his friends were with keeping their children safe. They went to great lengths to shelter their children from the dangers of the world. He decided it would be interesting to take that idea to the absolute extremes.
Dogtooth is an interesting film. And a weird, confounding one. Its meaning is opaque yet open to numerous interpretations. In some ways, it feels like a film where everyone involved tried to come up with the strangest, most absolutely “out-there” stuff they could think of and then filmed it, without necessarily finding a way to make it all fit into a cohesive story. Yet it somehow works.
A man only known as Father (Christos Stergioglou) and his wife, known as Mother (Michelle Valley), have three adult children – a son and two daughters, none of whom have names (but are played by Angeliki Papoulia, Christos Passalis, and Mary Tsoni). They live in an isolated compound with a large yard and swimming pool. The children have never left the compound and have been told that untold dangers lurk just outside. The father is the only one that leaves, and he can only leave in his car.
The children have been told they have an additional brother who was kicked out of the compound but lives just outside the fence. They often throw this unseen (and probably completely made-up) brother gifts and sometimes talk to him (though he never talks back.)
The children are given daily language lessons where they learn the wrong meanings for new (to them) words. For example, “zombies,” they are told, means little yellow flowers. They spend their days making up endurance tests for themselves, like seeing how long they can hold their hands to a hot tap, or how long they can hold their breath under water.
Lanthimos drops us straight into this world without explanation. We have to figure out what’s happening based on only the things he shows us. We are never told why the parents are treating their children this way or what the point is. The camera is held at a remove; it keeps us detached from the proceedings. He often shoots it with a widescreen but with odd compositions. Characters often walk into the frame with their heads or other appendages cropped out. It is as if we are watching some strange documentary where cameras were placed long ago and have never been moved.
Things take a turn when Father decides to bring in a stranger. He’s decided that the son needs sexual release so he hires a security guard named Christina (Anna Kalaitzidou) to come in and have sex with him. They aren’t allowed to form any other bond; they don’t develop a romance or anything; it is strictly physical. Christina is allowed to hang around at the house periodically. And she, apparently unsatisfied with the son’s sexual prowess, talks the oldest daughter into giving her oral sex. Or rather, she barters a headband for the sexual favors. This will eventually lead to the daughter learning more about the outside world than the father ever intended.
Like all of Lanthimos’ films, there is a dark humor running through these proceedings. There is a scene where one of the children throws a toy airplane just over the fence. But because they are not allowed outside, they must get their father to drive his car three feet past the gate so he can reach down, grab it, then reverse back into the compound. In another scene, the father convinces them that cats are the most ferocious beasts imaginable and that they will be eaten alive by them if they ever try to leave. He makes them get on all fours and bark like dogs in order to scare the cats away.
There is also stark violence. If the children disobey or in some manner do not listen to the parents, they are immediately punished with beatings.
It is difficult to know what to make of all this. There isn’t any formal narrative of any kind. As I mentioned earlier, it feels like a film where they just came up with the weirdest stuff they could think of and turned on the camera. It is definitely a film that was meant to start conversations. For 16 years, people have been talking about Dogtooth and pondering its meaning. Is it about the parental drive to keep their children safe no matter what? Is it satirizing homeschool culture or the way we all live inside our own cultural bubbles? I’m certainly not smart enough to say. What I do know is that there is no other filmmaker quite like Yorgos Lanthimos. I hope he continues to make strange, confounding films like Dogtooth for many years to come. I know we’ll continue to talk about them for as long as he does.
Kino Lorber presents Dogtooth with a beautiful new 4K UHD transfer. The movie was made with a very low budget using just a single camera and very little lighting setups, so you can’t come in expecting something magic, but for my money this transfer makes it look about as good as you can hope for.
Extras (all of which I believe were ported over form Kino Lorber’s previous Blu-ray release) are as follows:
4K (DISC 1) AND BLU-RAY (DISC 2) SPECIAL FEATURES
- Audio Commentary with Stars Angeliki Papoulia and Christos Passalis
- Audio Commentary by Film Critic Adam Nayman
BLU-RAY SPECIAL EXCLUSIVES (DISC 2)
- Yorgos Lanthimos in conversation with Kent Jones (2019, courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center)
- Interview with Yorgos Lanthimos (2009)
- Deleted scenes
- Trailers
Dogtooth is not a film I can say I’ll ever be itching to watch again. It is a deeply weird, discombobulating film. But I’m very glad I finally got to watch it. And this disc is an excellent way for anyone to watch it (and watch it again for those interested).
