I’ve seen a couple of Greek director Yorgos Lanthismos English language movies. These tend to be, well, a little weird. More than one of them has the cast deliver their lines without any emotions whatsoever. They are often off-putting on purpose. The characters aren’t really the sort you should be able to connect with. Really, his stuff isn’t for everybody.
But what was his work like in Greek? Well, to find out, I watched his 2009 movie Dogtooth.
In an unnamed location, two middle-aged parents keep their children completely isolated from the rest of the world. They deliberately give them incorrect definitions for common words, such as how “sea” is a sturdy chair, “motorway” is a strong wind, and “excursion” is a durable substance. The father works in a factory, but his children never leave the yard because they believe it is unsafe to do so outside a car and they are too young to drive. They won’t even step five feet outside an open gate to retrieve a toy airplane. Labels are cut off food products brought into the house, and the family’s phone is hidden away so the children don’t know it even exists. The only home entertainment is home movies of themselves.
Oh, and the children are actually all adults. None of them have names. There’s a son and his two sisters, referred to as the older and the younger. They’ve been told there was another brother who escaped and never came back. Everything the parents do is to keep the kids in the house and completely ignorant of the outside world. There is only one other person who comes to the house, a security guard at the factory where the father works named Christina. She’s one of the few characters to have a name, She comes to the house to have sex with the son. The daughters? Not so much. But Christina doesn’t have the same level of, let’s say, commitment to what the parents are doing in secret to their adult kids, and that means there may be a way for the curious older daughter to maybe finally learn what life is like outside of the house and garden where none of the kids actually dare to venture.
In fact, the lengths the parents go to in order to keep their children both at home–due to a combination of ignorance and fear–and well-behaved, including corporal punishment, is more or less what seems to make this movie. Their kids are all stunted obviously, behaving like kids with limited games to play from time to time, but with varying degrees of curiosity about what’s beyond the gates. The older daughter really wants to know things while the son is content to stay his parents’ child. The other daughter fits in somewhere in-between. Even if one did leave, it seems doubtful that they would have the skills to really survive the outside world. And yet, the parents can’t keep their kids confined forever, right?
I don’t think “like” is the right word to use for one of Lanthismos’s movies. They’re not the sort you watch for light entertainment. They’re meant to maybe provoke some thoughts about the way the human mind works and how relationships between people can be quite toxic. If anything, this might be one of the more normal movies of his I have seen. The world of the movie seems to understand whatever is going on in this house is unique to this world and not something everybody is doing. Instead, the movie is about two parents doing like most parents and trying but ultimately failing to keep the outside world away from their kids. The only difference here is these parents, unlike most, never really knew when to quit.
Grade: A
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