Dogtooth

I’m yet to see a normal film from the Balkans :-D… Following recommendations, I didn’t find out anything about Dogtooth before watching it (thanks Rob Roy), and I could not believe what I was seeing. In a sense, this film almost surpasses the infamous A Serbian Film, It’s really very unsettling and very sick. The current genre label is a pretty good joke. “Mum, what’s a cunt” - “A cunt is a big light. For example: If the cunt is turned off, Earth will be without light.” (01/23/2011)

Dogtooth is a psychological study of the behaviour and perception of the world on the part of three teenage siblings whose parents never allowed them to leave the fenced-in grounds of their family home. Unawareness, solidarity, incest, animalism. And the parent’s perverse intention to thus protect their children from the “evil world”, an intention that must inevitably spiral out of control. Yorgos is a psychological animal with an absolutely unique, almost scientific approach to writing and directing extreme subjects, which he evidently enjoys immensely. With the conclusion of his experiment – the last shot of the film – he deliberately pisses off the viewer, sparks a wave of discussion and almost purposefully takes one of the prizes at Cannes. Cunning. (01/16/2021)

Perfect. The most mined model situation of a family isolated behind a high wall, from which Lanthimos distilled a sheer sick bizarre sequence of scenes that escalate with a family dance to the sound of a guitar, a scene so brilliant that my mind cannot fathom it. But even the rest of the film is teeming with invention and a completely out-of-the-way sense of humor, which is exactly my blood type. Not just anyone can film such a beautifully deranged and sexually bent film. The Greek is no doubt crazy. Beautiful and dangerous. The cunt is indeed a great light, the entirety of the film Dogtooth is proof of this. (07/04/2011)