Dogtooth (2009)

"Zombie" is a small yellow flower. "Sea" is an armchair.

Some parents shield their children from the world. These parents do it by intentionally getting the words wrong.

A father and mother raise their three adult children inside a high-walled estate they never leave. Every word that arrives from outside is reassigned on the way in, every danger out there ("cats," for instance) is elaborately invented, and the only way out, the children are told, is when your dogtooth falls out and grows back.

The one outside contact the father permits is a young security guard from his factory, brought in to handle his son's sexual urges. She becomes the crack through which the house breaks open.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos shoots all of DOGTOOTH (2009) in calm wide frames and deadpan compositions. The horror is the cheerfulness. Adults playing parlor games for a prize of stickers. A toy fish. A made-up song about Dad. Then a sudden burst of violence, and the calm returns as if nothing happened.

It is read, depending on the reader, as a parable of the Greek family, of authoritarianism, of any closed system that builds its own reality and punishes contact with the outside. None of those readings is wrong.

---

Dogtooth (2009) was produced on a micro-budget of roughly €250,000, primarily funded by the Greek Film Center and Boo Productions, and shot in Athens with a minimalist setup and volunteer crew. After its premiere at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Un Certain Regard prize, it secured international theatrical distribution through several companies, including Kino International.