Dogtooth ( Kynodonthos )

Abstract

[...]the technique brings to mind the cinematography of another middle-class family nightmare, Michael Haneke's 1989 film The Seventh Continent (Der Siebente Kontinent), in which the profound alienation of the characters - who ultimately kill themselves rather than continue to live in a world of apparent meaninglessness - is reinforced by the fact that Haneke often included shots in which body parts were filmed in disorientating close-up as his characters carried out 'ordinary' household tasks. [...]the subject matter and deliberately skewed cinematography of Dogtooth bring to mind the thought that if Haneke were Greek (and had a sense of humour) this is a film he could have made.

Arrested Development

Dogtooth (Kynodonthos)

(Dir. Giorgos Lanthimos) Greece 2009

Verve Pictures

Seldom has Philip Larkin's poetic observation "They fuck you up/Your Mum and Dad" been more grimly appropriate than in relation to Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos' morbidly witty Dogtooth, winner of the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes in 2009. The 'children' of the offending parents in Dogtooth are three young adults - two women and a man - in their late teens or early twenties who have been kept completely isolated from the outside world for as long as they can remember. Although 'father' goes out to work every day in his Mercedes (to his job as manager of the factory that provides our only glimpse of the outside world), his wife and children remain at home, confined within the gated surrounds of their country home. There's a huge back garden, a luxurious swimming pool, and a well-appointed house. The grass is green, and the sun always shines. A large wooden fence cuts off any view of the outside world. 'The children', as they are always identified within the film, spend their days playing childish, bizarre games, bickering among themselves, and bartering with each other for the few small trinkets - a hair-band here, a measuring tape there - which their parents permit them to own.

It's as though they've been on school holidays for every single day of their lives. The youngsters are most often dressed in shorts, t-shirts and swimming costumes, often clad entirely in white, while their father, a man of the world, is almost always seen in a suit and tie. There's a sense of paralysing boredom and, understandably, barely suppressed frustration to the children's sorely restricted lives that Lanthimos and his cinematographer evoke with considerable skill, often by framing otherwise unremarkable shots in a deliberately off-kilter manner which reinforces the wholly unnatural, artificial nature of their lives.

Indeed, the technique brings to mind the cinematography of another middle-class family nightmare, Michael Haneke's 1989 film The Seventh Continent (Der Siebente Kontinent), in which the profound alienation of the characters - who ultimately kill themselves rather than continue to live in a world of apparent meaninglessness - is reinforced by the fact that Haneke often included shots in which body parts were filmed in disorientating close-up as his characters carried out 'ordinary' household tasks. In fact, the subject matter and deliberately skewed cinematography of Dogtooth bring to mind the thought that if Haneke were Greek (and had a sense of humour) this is a film he could have made.

It must be noted as well that Lanthimos' premise is actually quite a common trope in the modern horror movie, although the execution is genuinely original. Wes Craven's The People Under the Stairs (1991), for instance, features a deranged brother-and-sister who live as man and wife and keep their kidnapped 'daughter' Alice a prisoner in their booby-trapped suburban home, forcing her to wear little-girl dresses and sleep in a room obviously meant for a much younger child. In both the 1993 Australian horror film Bad Boy Bub by (dir. Rolf de Heer), and the 1970 British film Mumsy Nanny Sonny and Girly (dir. Freddie Francis), grown men are treated like giant babies by their overbearing 'mothers'. A more recent exploration of many of the same themes can be found in M. Night Shyamalan's 2004 film The Village, in which, remarkably, the director seems wholeheartedly to endorse the fact that the parents of his artificially 'old world' community have deliberately been lying to their children for years about the nature of the world outside. Just as the youngsters of The Village have been told that venturing beyond the boundaries of their community will mean death at the hands of monsters which dwell in the forest, so too are the young people in Dogtooth told that terrible creatures called 'cats' stalk the land beyond the safety of the garden fence. An older brother, (never seen, but referred to several times during the course of the narrative) is said to have been devoured by them, although the audience knows that the truth is that he has probably escaped. This he leads to one of the film's most gruesomely funny scenes: when a tiny kitten strays onto the property, brother bravely (and graphically) dispatches it with a pair of garden shears while his screaming sisters look on from the 'safety' of the house.

The claustrophobia of the basic set-up is heightened by the fact that everyone in the fdm, except for the sole outsider to enter (disastrously) into this hermetically sealed world, is referred to only in relation to their position within the family - as brother, sister, father, mother, daughter, son, etc. It's a telling sign: individual identity has been subsumed into the family itself. Although the children are prisoners, they don't even know it, or at least, certainly not on a conscious level, making their position all the more tragic. Even language itself has been used as a means of authoritarian control. Their parents have deliberately given them false definitions for certain words that are usually associated with the outside world - "Pass the telephone" for instance, means "Pass the salt". Their ability to understand the world, and to piece together the truth about their predicament, is fatally compromised by the fact that they have so deliberately and systematically been given the wrong words with which to define reality - "zombie" is a small yellow flower, "sea" is a "leather armchair" and most bizarrely (and suggestively) of all, "pussy" is, according to their mother, "a great light". The children therefore lack even the language which would allow them to realise just how constrained their lives actually are: they are as much prisoners intellectually as they are physically. It's a realisation that Lanthimos cleverly reinforces by having the actors playing the children always speak in the slightly halting, inarticulate and naïve manner of someone with a mild intellectual impairment. Mary Tsoni, the actress playing the younger daughter is particularly good at this and effectively conveys childlike incomprehension and innocence throughout.

From the very opening scenes of the film - in which the children take part in their latest bout of a game they call 'Endurance', a competition to see who can withstand pain for the longest - violence, barely suppressed, bubbles underneath, occasionally exploding on the surface, such as in the scene in which the eldest sister (who gradually becomes the main focus of the narrative) suddenly slashes her brother on the arm with a knife during an argument. Eldest herself has a prominent scar on her shoulder - is this a remnant of an earlier incident? Tellingly, she slashes her brother because he found the toy airplane which she believed was hers: their parents throw them into the garden whenever a real plane passes overhead and then tell the children that it has crashed. As far as the children are concerned, they are the only people in the world, and so it makes complete sense that the only media the family consumes are home movies of themselves, a neat reflection of the insularity and narcissism of the nuclear family.

Given the circumstances then, it is hardly surprising that the introduction of an outsider from the 'real' world should have unsettling and ultimately horrific consequences. The father decides that his son's sexual needs should be facilitated (those of his daughters are, of course, ignored) and assigns the job to Christina, a young security guard at his factory. He drives her in a blindfold to the family home, ushers her in to his son's room, and then pays her to have sex with him. But any contact at all with the outside world is contamination. The 'children' - and in particular the young women - gaze upon the insouciant, deadpan outsider with absolute fascination, intrigued by the fact that she comes from beyond the boundaries of their home. And Christina turns this fascination to her own advantage, exploiting the eldest girl's childish enthralment and naïveté by encouraging her to exchange sexual favours for things like hair gel, and sparkly hair-bands. The eldest then unthinkingly and mechanically replicates this behaviour with her younger sister.

As if the introduction of sex into this world of perpetual childhood isn't destabilising enough, Christina reluctantly accedes to eldest's demands that she provide VHS movies for her to watch. After watching the likes of Jaws and Rocky in secret, the eldest, who, of all the children, has always shown the most awareness of their entrapment, re-enacts scenes from the forbidden films with an intensity that is at first amusing - as when the siblings pretend there is a shark in the swimming pool - and then downright disturbing, as when she recites monologues from Rocky with unhinged intensity. There's also a truly remarkable sequence - perhaps the standout scene in the film - during one of the family's many entertainment nights (during which the children are excepted to perform for their parents), eldest suddenly diverges from the endearingly awkward dance she and her sister have prepared to engage in what seems to be an impromptu recreation of the famous routine from Flashdance. Like many moments in the film, it's so bizarre that it starts off morbidly funny but soon becomes deeply disturbing, as the long-limbed, gawky young woman (excellently played by Aggeliki Papoulia) throws her body around the neat living room with a manic and desperate energy which manages to unsettle her parents as much as the audience.

Like any repressive regime - be it Iran, China or North Korea - power lies in controlling all access to the world outside, and to the media, and when Christina's crimes are discovered she pays a terrible (and grimly appropriate) price. Eldest is punished too, by being battered around the head with the illicit tapes themselves. VHS features in another important way in the film: the parents' late night viewing of hardcore pom is suggestive of the latent (and not so latent) sexual dysfunction that pervades the house. It seems horribly inevitable, then, when the father decides that it would be simpler - and safer - to keep things in the family instead, and declares that his son will have to chose between his sisters.

At a time where certain notorious real-life instances of abuse within the nuclear family (the Fritzl case naturally comes to mind but Ireland has also had its fair share of domestic horror stories reported in the media of late) have helped reinforce the suspicion that real horror all too often lies within the home, Dogtooth's premise isn't as unlikely as it may once have seemed. While the subject matter is familiar, though, the execution is anything but. This Greek tragedy is one of the best films I've seen all year: a true tour de force of considerable originality, energy and vision which convincingly refutes the saccharine 1950s truism that father knows best.

Bernice M. Murphy